Things I sort of believe about making music
&gt; Christmas Music<p>One important skill I&#x27;ve found necessary in both music and my software career is <i>dissociation</i>. By that, I mean the ability to separate yourself from the work that you&#x27;ve created. It&#x27;s natural to feel that what you have made is a reflection of yourself and your value, but it also leads to a lot of fear. In the music world, this manifests as a fear of releasing music and instead endlessly tweaking knobs and refining 4 bar loops; in the software world, I see it manifest in the form of not making difficult decisions out of fear of taking responsibility, due to the fear of failure of those decisions reflecting on you personally.<p>In leadership training sessions I&#x27;ve taken at Amazon and elsewhere, this attempts to get addressed by some bs &quot;vulnerability&quot; segment where the facilitator asks you to share something about your childhood that was difficult, or a time when you made a mistake in your life, something like that. Personally I just make something up or say something really generic here, which I assume many others do as well. I feel like a much more effective way to train this &quot;dissociation&quot; skill would be something like the Christmas Music approach. Music and art are deeply personal works; sharing something you&#x27;ve created to the world and getting sometimes harsh feedback (or, more likely, no feedback at all!) is a far better way to learn how to be vulnerable than a carefully chosen story from your childhood that makes you look like you had it rough (but not <i>too</i> rough). It&#x27;s also more relevant since it&#x27;s about making your <i>output</i> vulnerable, rather than your <i>personality</i>.<p>Musically, I have a bit of a fanbase now, which I still find shocking. But still, every time I release a new song and see the initial Soundcloud plays roll in my stomach goes into knots. <i>Why aren&#x27;t they liking it? Is this song way worse than my other songs? Did I release garbage and people hate me now?</i> It&#x27;s a very tough feeling to overcome.