Magic?

These days, things seem to come so easily to people. You hear of bands making it big overnight, someone being picked out of thousands of applicants to enter in a reality TV show where they make a hundred thousand in an instant, actors and actresses who seemingly randomly get chosen and the next second they’re on every magazine in the store. Sound familiar?

There’s got to be a reason for this though, I mean, it’s not like there’s such a thing as magic...right?

Let’s take a look. We’ll take the first example of a band making it big. Usually, it’s referred to as a band being “discovered.” What does a band have to do in order to be “discovered” though? It’d make sense that they’d have to be playing a gig. Fair enough, but what are the chances of them playing one gig and getting found? Slim to none. So that band had to be playing a lot of shows, all over the place in order to be heard by just the right person.

Speaking as someone who has been helping promote a band for quite some time now, it is not like you can just go out and call up a music VIP to book shows. So finding venues gets factored in. Where in this new town do you go to play to the correct audience, get the most people, if you’re lucky get paid and play a set memorable enough that you’ll be invited back? To go through all of this you really have to love what you do, or love who you support. A lot.

Bands work. It’s a 24/7 job of staying in good communication with the other members, with people who will help support you and those who will hopefully become your next biggest fan. (Or your label!) The difference though, between going to your 9-5 day job that you possibly can’t stand and their 24/7 job is the passion that’s put into it. When you go to a concert and see the musician having so much fun, it’s because they are! They love their job: they love what they do so much that they’ll stick through anything to keep doing it.

When someone has that much passion, that much drive, you start to see how these things don’t fall into place as randomly as you thought. That person who was chosen out of thousands, well something was different about them. Whether it was the factor that they would add so much drama to the show or the producers saw the drive in them that we maybe can’t see until the final night of American Idol, when we have to decide who really deserves this more. That actor or actress that was chosen? My guess is that they had been going to auditions, auditions, auditions and worked themselves silly; their “big break” was earned.

So this is magic. These people have found what they love and put so much into it that they get the bonus of creating their whole life. It’s time we all added some magic, even if all you can do at this point is set up a corner in your basement, grab a paintbrush and start painting.

Paint a masterpiece.