Experience & Developing a Thick Skin
Performing can be difficult. Everybody has bad nights, and every so often a night will be a disaster, where you hang your head in shame, and leave quickly and silently. When you start out, it’s the most difficult because this tends to happen more often, and lessens as you improve with performance experience.
Performing is a skill that is only learnt by doing; it isn’t something you can learn from a book. The only way to become a good performer is to start by being a rubbish performer and improve. It’s not often that you will be the best performer of the night, and if it is, often enough somebody will come along and show you up. It’s just the way art works.
The ‘Edge’ - Experience
There are dreamers, and there are do-ers. Getting experience means going on stage, swallowing the nerves, cocking up royally, taking the abuse and lack of applause, and then going back and doing it again. This can be a relatively traumatic process, but it can be made relatively painless if you see it as a means to an end. Unfortunately, you have to go through this process to go from a bad performer to a good performer.
Eventually, after having done enough shows like this, you will become much more able and develop a thicker skin, so when things go wrong, you can just laugh at yourself and forget about it.
Experience Will Make You Better than Everybody Else
People who are born with talent annoy me. The rest of us have to work at it. It is, however, what you do with it that counts, and by playing more, you will gain something that they do not have, so even if they are better musicians than you, play more instruments, write more songs or whatever, you will be able to upstage them with your performance. The ability to do this is essential to being singed.
Conclusion
The simple conclusion of this article is to dream less, play more. If you haven’t played many shows, do it. It is scary at first, but it won’t kill you. Do it a few times and you’ll wonder what you worried about. If it all goes horribly wrong, don’t worry, just book another gig and try again. Success comes from unwillingness to give up, so that if you can make that a virtue of yourself, all will be well.