It's 1987, I'm 12, and I've just got my first pair of decks. They don't match and they're not special, but every night after school I'm in my bedroom with them, getting it wrong over and over until it starts to sound right.
I want to be a DJ. Nobody's going to give me that title. The only way to get it is to play records, a lot of them, badly at first. (The full story of those decks is in Bedroom decks, 1987: where it started.)
Noun and verb
Here's the simplest rule I know. If you want to be the noun, you have to do the verb first.
Want to be a runner? Run. A writer? Write. A pianist has to play the piano, and someone who wants to run a business has to actually run one. If you want to be known for your content, you have to make content. Lots of it.
So many people fall in love with the noun. The title, the label, the picture of themselves once they've made it. They spend ages thinking about being the thing and almost no time doing it.
No shortcut
And there's always someone selling a shortcut. The hack, the secret, the five-minute version. There isn't one. If you want to get good at something, you put in the work, and you keep putting it in.
It's the same reason I still believe the skills that don't go out of date are the ones worth practising. Practice is the verb. The noun turns up later, usually when you've stopped watching for it.
Still doing it
I've been playing records since that bedroom in 1987, and I still practise. Nobody calls me a DJ because I once owned some decks. They call me one because I never stopped using them.
The same goes for everything else I've ever wanted to be called. Runner. Author. Both of those came after the doing, never before. And none of it had to be perfect first. Done beats perfect.
First published October 2017.
