One of my biggest regrets is how many years I suffered needlessly because I didn’t value my own work.
Here are some pics from 20 years ago, February 1999. Me DJing in front a literal sea of people at the International Centre just outside of Toronto. People paid and traveled to come to see me. I had sold hundreds of thousands of CDs at this time, and my rave company, Hullabaloo, was at its peak.
When this event was over, I went home to my 1 bedroom basement apartment. I had abandoned my piece of crap car in the street about a month before these pics were taken because I had no money to pay for insurance or fix the car.
I lived without a car for 14 years after this.
I have to make this even more clear: I just had 5,000 people buy tickets to see me and I was broke! If I calculated the hourly wage of the months of planning and risk that went into putting an event on of this size, not to mention my value as an attraction – I was working for below minimum wage.
I lived in apartments until 2012.
I didn’t value the experience I was creating for all of my patrons. I was fixated on keeping prices low, about making a small bit of profit in some misguided attempt at not looking like a money grub combined with blue-collar guilt.
And I suffered greatly because of it. The sad thing was, I was still accused of “being in it for the money”. People would do bar napkin math and guess that I was making 100x more what the reality was. So, my suffering wasn’t even quieting those critics. I did it for nothing!
My real fans, the ones that truly valued this one of a kind experience I was creating, I’m sure would tell me the event was actually priceless.
This would be the advice I would give my younger self now:
1) Focus on the value of what you are creating. What is it “worth” to someone, not what did it cost.
2) Your time is valuable! It is not free! You are the sum total of all your knowledge and experiences, combined with the value you are delivering to someone. Don’t work for free!
3) Don’t compare what you are doing with anyone else, or anything you’ve done before. Abandon all that stinky thinking. Focus on what it is you are doing now, and what is that worth to someone.
4) You can’t please the critics, so don’t bother.
Till next time.
PS: I recently posted some video from this exact rave, if you are curious to see what it was all about:
