 It's the network. Baww, what's up Brandman Network, it's Sean and this is video number five of the reprogramming series. Extremely important. This is the last video for now at least and what we got to talk about is something that I once again didn't realize I would have to talk about before when I first started dealing with artists years ago. And that's self-esteem. What I find to be a very real situation is a lot of artists honestly don't have high self-esteem. This might sound like a joke to some of you, but it's the reality. Part of it is that school system that I lean back towards because it says, hey, you got to get a gold star, you got to get an A, you got to get a B plus. You have to get all these things that validate who you are and your identity and you don't get that out here as an independent artist. You don't get that at all. You don't get the numbers on a chart, especially at the beginning when you're building. You don't have anything. All you have is your mind and your vision and you have to be able to stay on it until it actually comes into fruition before other people can even see something worth congratulating openly, right? When it's just inside you, nothing else is going to happen, right? Nobody can really applaud it because they don't even see what's going on. And if anything, they might see failure when they look at you. So the self-esteem thing is real and it's understood. As a matter of fact, so much of independent artist struggles and just artist struggles really reflect entrepreneur struggles. If you look at entrepreneurs, what people don't talk about with entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, not artists at all, like entrepreneurs, you can do your research, right? And the same way I talked about the factory model schooling and you can look that up, you look up entrepreneur suicide rates to be really serious, right? Being an entrepreneur is hard and dealing with the anxiety and you having to have all this weight on you and you trying to build something out of nothing and going against the grain and then sometime failing, failing, failing before you can exceed succeed is a real thing. It's a real thing and it's stressful. A lot of artists go through that same thing and now we're asking artists to also take on being an entrepreneur. Being an artist, comes with many of those same quirks and stresses and now we're talking about be that and then also do this other thing that brings on more of that regardless of if you're an artist or not. I get it. That can be stressful for us. Here are some things that can help. I learned this when I was actually early on and I was working at somebody else's company and they were killing it. They truly were killing it and growing. I think the company is probably going to go on to be a billion dollar company. I'm pretty sure on that and we had some primary competition. I'm not sure if they're around still, but the goal, the thing is they would say, yo, I know they dropped this dope video. I know they just landed this big client and y'all have to understand we know it's stressful in here. We know that things look messy and like chaos in here, but when you look at that company, you only see in front of the curtains as well. They have that same thing going on whether we know it or not. They do have that same thing going on because that's just a part of business. We reflect this back to Instagram today. When they say people are just posting the highlights, trust me, everybody is going through something. Everybody has these issues that is not as easy. That rollout is it didn't go as cleanly as it looked. The biggest thing you can do for yourself is one, stop comparing yourself. Stop comparing yourself to other people, other artists, other people's timeline, whatever age somebody is and they did it by this age and you thought that you were going to have it done by this age and now you're five, 10 years later. I knew when I went to college, 18 years old, I was like, look man, I really don't want to do this college thing. First, I'm going to play football. That didn't work out for some other reasons. I don't want to get into that, but we can say politics and a tremendous knee injury. But the other thing was I'll stay on college a semester and that's cool because I'm just trying to build my own business and then graduate. But then another semester passed because I didn't come up with that idea and I didn't get rich yet. Then another semester passed and then I still wasn't rich. And then another semester passed and I literally in the entire time I was in college until I graduated, I swear to you two weeks before I graduated, I was like, bro, I don't want to do this. I was done with the test and everything. I'm like, man, I don't want to do this thing. I was upset I was graduating college because I never want to do it. I only said I'm going to be an entrepreneur and I'm just going to do this college thing for a second because my mind wasn't going to do it. That was my mentality. And I say that to say sometimes that goal like keeps getting pushed down the field, but you got to keep going towards it because that's the process that so many people go through. I go through that. Jake Cole himself basically said the same thing. He went from North Carolina to New York to go to college because he went to college in New York thinking he's going to get signed by all these people in New York. He was going to be in college for two weeks before he got signed. Next thing you know, he was going to graduate it and it was past graduation. He still hadn't got signed, right? It's a very real thing. So stop comparing yourself to people. We all got our different journeys. Cool. JZ popped off at 26. Jake Cole popped off at like 25. I think I can't tell you how old future and two chains were when they really start popping. It really varies. It truly varies. I know some old men, some country dudes, Pokey Bear, if you look at this dude up, they really start popping and having their own thing probably in their fifties and sixties. You might not like their music, but they're popping and what they're doing. So keep in mind this age thing, get rid of it. This whole watching and comparing thing, get rid of it. But now without that being said, I mean we're saying enough right there. Here's this other thing. You got to be realistic with yourself because don't get caught in delusion and thinking that this is my type of music. There's a lot of artists that to me, this is just my opinion. But they could sound great to somebody else. But I know artists where I listen and their raps are like, yo, this is dope, bro. This is dope. Then I hear another song and they'll be singing all throughout the song because it's cool and trendy to sing and they can't sing. It's not your thing, which is cool. But don't let it interrupt the music, right? It's cool that this is not your thing. Everything does not have to be your thing just because it's trendy. Don't let it get into you and make you delusional versus what you actually have, your real talents. Stay in your bag, get in your bag and maximize. Get everything in your bag because you're going to move, right? You're going to get in somebody else's lane and then somebody else is going to take your lane, the one that you own, that you should have owned based on the natural talents that you have, right? It doesn't mean don't try to sing if you can't sing a little bit and all that stuff. But still understand where your strengths are musically talent wise, just like you should in your own organization, right? In terms of whether you have graphic design abilities or video editing abilities or I don't know, management and understanding of contracts and deal making, right? All this thing, this entire, entire independence thing because this entire entrepreneur thing is about self-awareness, right? So when it comes to your music, the reason it's so important to be self-aware is because if you're doing stuff and you're putting out product, it is like hurtful and demoralizing for you to keep putting out stuff and keep putting your heart into stuff and it's not catching on. I get it to put it on empty ears or deaf ears or to have a hundred people hear it but then nobody really rocks with it. Sometimes artists are selling themselves short by mixing in things due to trend that have nothing to do with what they actually have going on personally. So please keep that thing in mind as well, right? Of course there's this whole other idea of you might not be talking to the right fan base. That's cool as well, find that right fan base but there has to be some checks and balances. I don't know how you're gonna make it happen for yourself figure out some way if you're struggling with this music to find the truth of where your strengths are musically and where they aren't, right? It's no, there's nothing wrong with not being a musical genius in all aspects. Kanye West isn't the greatest singer in the world but he knew how to mess with it and do enough to make it sound good, right? But Kanye West isn't the best rapper in the world and you know he raps, raps, raps but he has a lot of ghost writing happening as well. Like he knows where his strengths are. Just point blank, right? He's able to outsource in other things even though other people don't take him seriously because of it or take or you know it's hard to do that with Kanye because of his musical output but so many other artists of course they're not as big and they get a lot of flak because they don't have people writing for them. I mean because they might have somebody writing for them or they can't write a lot of stuff musically but you can perform your butt off, right? Just like Cardi B she's a great performer and has a great delivery of the music so when I say before I don't talk about performing the music. A recording artist meaning a studio. In the studio you can kill it. You might not be great at writing it, you might not be even be great at performing it. Some people shouldn't be performing, right? All these things are things for you to consider and be real with yourself and not only say this because there's so many avenues of music. There's so many ways to be successful in music. There's ways you can be successful without ever even recording music yourself in terms or like even trying to push out tracks individually to the public. You can just push it to movies and do it that way, right? Or in singleizing and singleizing and then build a whole lifestyle. Like my mind said change when I was like 19 years old and saw this dude I met him randomly and that dude I was 19. I think that dude was like 18 or 17 and he was telling me that he was making $250,000 well not making $250,000 a year. He made $250,000 the prior year and was trying to make $500,000 the current year that he was telling me just because he was producing for Disney cruises at that time. That was where most of his money came from. Producing for a Disney cruise, right? Like that's a completely different thing. It's not the sexiest thing in the world but he was making bank, all right? And that was what that guy was doing. I was like what? I couldn't believe it. Like I really could not believe it because we only get sold as one route. The Beyonce, Jay-Z, I don't know Chris Brown, Drake, like that one route Taylor Swift, all these people this one route. This is how you become successful. You become this specific type of star. I also know another guy who's really a really dope CEO right now but he in his 20s for like five to eight years was a singer on a cruise ship as well, funny enough. And I didn't know that about him until maybe like three years of knowing him and it was surprising to hear but he was making great money and traveling with them all year, right? So there's so many different routes to this game. Please do not allow yourself to be demoralized and not allow yourself to have low self-esteem. You have to build yourself up. So the last thing I would say the greatest thing you can do to help that is get small wins. Small, small wins, these great huge results where you're like yo I'm gonna blow up this year and then not blowing up which is almost unrealistic especially based on the budget and resources that people have, right? Not blowing up is going to make you feel worse. I'm going to have 500,000 followers this year and then you end the year with 5,000 followers and now you don't like yourself or you don't like your situation when you could be focusing on the fact that you went from zero to 5,000 that year, right? Which would make it look like a win. Use that for your own confidence and then figure out how to make that plus 5,000 become plus 10,000 and then use that small win to make that plus 10,000 be plus 20,000, right? On top of each other. Build one brick at a time and the next thing you know like the Will Smith quote you have a wall you look back and you've actually built something. That's why the Gauntlet is built as it is. Week by week delivery where you can't just speed through it because we're in these bad habits of moving where we think that we can just binge stuff and get real life results. Binging stuff does work right for taking in content. Binging doesn't work for getting real life results and building infrastructure. You have to go through the process. You can speed up the amount of work you do, but at the end of the time, end of the day we need time and we have to build. Keep that in mind because it will worsen your self-esteem. We're already working like backwards so starting from negative a lot of us because we went through this school system that compared us and put us through this system that wasn't built for us. It wasn't us individually and then especially for your artists, right? You already probably have your own different quirks or just different ways of seeing things. You're struggling, so help yourself. Be self-aware, understand what you truly do have. Also, have small wins. Set realistic goals and keep yourself just in a good space mentally. Be positive. Have good self-talk. That might be the most motivation or positive video I've ever created, but the reason it's done is it's important in terms of this reprogramming because this series is going to help you skip through a lot of BS that artists go through if you just listen to it and act on it because this self-esteem thing, it causes so many artists to think that I'm going to depend on this person and this person is going to change my life. I'm going to be dependent on them is not how it works. Even people that we want to help, I'm going to tell you so many people out in the industry, they want to help a lot of people. A lot of people do want to help, but they can't change your life immediately unless they're taking you in on their situation. They're incentivized because they still got their life to live, right? So it takes more than just meeting people and even having some connections or having even people know you if they're not fully invested in your situation yourself. Find people to get insight, but to actually truly help and lift you up is not the greatest plan for blowing up, right? You can't planned to find people who are going to change your life. So keep that in mind. That's the end of this reprogramming series, at least as I know it for now. Let me know how you like this series. Are there any other questions? We could talk about this in the Brandman Network space, the group chat space, or even if you have some suggestions and you would like some stuff to add or talk about, then we can make that thing happen. Other than that, as always, let's get to work.