Artists, It’s Time to Quit.

No. Not on my watch. That feeling you get when you read or see something that sets you off. It wasn’t anger that welled up in me, but an overwhelming urge to right a wrong and set the world back in order. I guess it’s the fixer in me. The parent in me had the sort of reaction you have when your child falls, mostly unharmed but about to cry. You swiftly pick them up, brush them off, and tell them everything is fine before they even realize something might hurt.

I usually get a slight bit of wooziness from the vibrations of the bridge as I walk from Williamsburg to Manhattan, but on this day I was feeling steady. I‘d been trying to detox myself from my phone on morning walks like this, but I caved and brought up Instagram. An artist who I respect and genuinely enjoy listening to had posted about waking up that day and feeling like quitting. I had to stop and reread it to make sure my increasingly poor vision wasn’t tricking me. One thing that I have 20/20 vision with is artists, and on this day I could see her clearly from 2798.8 miles away, especially when she couldn’t.

From the outside, it’s easy to think that a successful artist has it all figured out. How could an artist want to quit when they have the attention of almost 2 million monthly listeners and 100 million-plus streams on their top 5 tracks on Spotify. That's real impact, isn’t it?

I pulled out my voice transcribing app and yelled the following into the phone over the noise of the passing J train.

We all want to quit. All of us. Some once a year, some monthly, some moment to moment. It happens to those who are “following their passion” and those you see “killing it”. Those with metrics most would kill for. The desire to quit can be incredibly strong for you as an artist especially. Maintaining your efforts — when it feels like pushing a boulder up a hill — can be utterly exhausting.

There is often so much fear and anxiety wrapped up in your life as an artist. Those of you on the front end of your career arc fear that no one will ever truly care, and those of you who are more established fear your fans will lose interest and stop showing up. I have some news for you: this anxiety will live with you no matter what you achieve, and if not held in check it can control you. I recall a conversation I had with an 8-time Grammy-winning artist at the height of her career, and all she really wanted to do was escape that life and move upstate, drink tea, read, and be alone. That one stuck with me.

When I first started in the music business, the artist experience was very different in terms of the day to day struggle that you went through. Without the lens of social media always on you, the daily expectations were almost nonexistent. There was quite literally no one watching. Your whole life and creative process in between albums was private. The pressures and anxieties were there, but they certainly did not carry a daily weight in the same way they do now. There was an inherent patience built-in to an artist’s efforts. Everyone knew it was a long game business to enter into, and in general, an artist’s urges to quit were at much wider intervals and for different reasons.

For artists over the last decade, it’s not been an easy ride. Social media culture has been around long enough now that we are starting to understand the health implications of what we have been doing to ourselves, and it’s not pretty. Social media is not the sole culprit behind the urge to quit, but it certainly can be an amplifier and magnifier of insecurities and fears. The judgment of others (real or perceived), coupled with the tendency to compare ourselves to others, can trigger the question, Is what I’m grinding so hard for even worth it?

Your external successes will always be a small percentage of your efforts. Let’s call it 20 to 30%. Some of you might see the success of established artists and, comparing yourself to them, anxiously long for your visible success to manifest quickly. You miss the iceberg laying under the surface, not realizing that these “successful” artists have logged thousands of additional hours — and suffered numerous failures — before becoming outwardly successful.

For the established artist, you are very much aware of the 70% personal and professional failure that happened to achieve the successes that everyone else sees. And that 70% can feel heavy to endure.

You don’t want to quit being creative or making music, that’s certainly not it. You can’t. Without the ability to create music your soul would be so cripplingly empty it would be hard to put into words. I know you. You are the ones who are thinking about mix revisions at the alter on your wedding day. You are the ones whose mind is writing lyrics when your partner is talking to you. Music is baked into the very fabric of your being. It’s not who you are, but it’s damn close to being essential for your survival as an organism.

So what is it that you want to actually quit?

I want to draw a sharp distinction between who you are as an artist and the expectations you attach to building a career around it. The urges to quit come solely from the latter. What‘s really happening here is that the feelings you are now experiencing after achieving your current level of success are not a match for how you thought you would feel long ago, when you first pictured what this level of achievement would look like. This internal discrepancy is at the root of your wanting to quit. Mismatching expectations will always shake your foundation and leave you vulnerable to regular sensations of being lost or wanting to give up. This dissonance between expectations and reality is at the heart of your frustration, so let us acknowledge it for what it is.

While you are grateful for how far you have come, your achievements are not enough to silence the quitting voice. You have a choice: you can either drag it with you into your future or let it tag along on your journey, kept in check.

Moving forward, as you continue to have dreams and aspirations, do your best to not project what it will feel like if, and when, you achieve your vision. Consider that achievements and metric milestones are just trail markers, letting you know you are on a path, however, achievements can be false peaks. The summit you should be climbing for is the one where you arrive at a point where you can see with true clarity how much you have grown and evolved as an artist. That's a worthy pursuit and one that will always feel right.

I say, quit. Quit the bullshit stories you sell yourself about yourself. Quit the anxiety. Quit the voice that’s running unchecked in your subconscious — the one that says you aren’t enough, or that you need the validation of others. Quit the negative voices within your inner circle that try to keep you small. Quit not taking care of yourself. Quit the fear of missing out. Quit guilt. Quit being fearful. Quit having expectations for anyone, including yourself. Quit using your circumstances being as an excuse. And quit using the feeling of wanting to quit as a distraction from asking yourself the hard and deeper questions of what you are after. Quit being tethered to an algorithm. Quit the false narrative that growth means becoming more popular or seeing an increase in metrics. Quit letting the external noise chip away at the stability of your internal compass. It is the expectations that you need to quit on, not the career path.

At this moment right now, and at this level of success, just BE. Be here right now. No one has any idea of where this is all headed for you, so just enjoy the ride moment to moment. The sheer will power you have displayed to get here, and the adversity you have overcome, provide everything you’ll you are going to need to flourish in the next phase of your career. It’s not going to look or feel exactly how you envision it, so enjoy the surprise and variety of it all and never quit on music

• As I publish this piece, most of you that I follow have been posting your end of year Spotify listening statistics. With a little perspective, I see how truly grateful you are for each listen and listener. Seeing the data summarized can give you that spark of confidence to move forward into next year. And I also know that some of you will be triggered by something in the coming weeks and question everything. Hold onto the gratitude as long as you can. Whatever your summary says indicates that you have made a considerable impact on listeners or a small one, but an impact nonetheless. And that counts for something.

Soundtrack courtesy of “Exhale” by Ella Vos and R3HAB, included here on The Compass Method Spotify playlist; updated monthly with a mix of new discoveries and songs I generally obsess over. It pairs well with long stares out the window plotting your next move. If this piece resonated with you please share with other artists who might find it valuable and check out my previous stories on Medium.

Patrick Ermlich is a life-long artist guide, creative director, and CMO of Gramophone Media.