THE DAY I WAS OFFERED $120,000 (PLUS BENEFITS) TO QUIT WRITING SONGS

There have been many days in my writing career when I thought about quitting. The voices in my head have frequently tossed out “I’m not sure you’re good enough” or “The odds are stacked against you”. Most of those days have followed some sort of big disappointment. A hold lost. A cut that was a “sure thing” that fell through. A single that didn’t happen. I’ve endured many of those days.

​A friend offers to take me to lunch. The big test of my resolve came one day when a friend staged an intervention of sorts. He offered to take me to lunch. That’s like inviting a fox into the hen house. A struggling songwriter is always going to be up for a meal with a good friend and having a discussion, hoping something good comes out of it. So, I went. And lunch began with lots of probing questions regarding my songwriting career.

“How many cuts have you had?” “How much are you making?” “ZERO” was the answer to both. Then he moved into “How is your family scraping by?” and questions like that. I still didn’t really know where he was going with the whole conversation, but I was sinking lower and lower in my seat. Here I was admitting to a friend that I was failing in my pursuit of my dream. The dream that I left a good life behind, hoping to achieve it. And, maybe even failing my family in the process. Finally, he got to the point. He wanted to offer me a job.  The job would pay $120,000 plus benefits. I never had been hired anywhere in my life before (and I still hadn’t had such experience to this day I’m writing this) and I was always thinking maybe I had done a huge mistake choosing this path and maybe it was better for me to stick to a desk job and have a fixed monthly salary. And now here I am, with a friend who have faith in me, more than what I even had in myself, but not as a writer or a producer. He had faith in my management skills because he had seen how I came to this country when I barely could speak any English and now, I’m a songwriter and a label owner which is estimated to value around one million dollars. But the problem is that it is not creating much of “cash” and the value of my label was more about “how much it worth” rather than “how much it makes”. So, what he was offering was a sweet deal to me. It was secure. It was responsible. And, it was about management which I learned naturally since my earliest memories of my childhood. My father used to be the CEO of a massive industrial machines manufacturer company and he is considered as one of the most successful people I ever met in my life, and as the great father he is, he never failed even one chance of teaching me some valuable management lesson, since I think I was 3 or 4 years old! So, the job this friend was offering was a piece of cake for me and he knew that. Everything was great, but it was NOT music!
I went home and thought it over. And over. And over. I had to look myself in the mirror and ask: “Do you really believe you can continue being a songwriter?” And “Are you willing to do what it takes to succeed as a writer?” “You are suffering. Are you willing to suffer more for your goal?
I concluded that I wasn’t put on this planet to do management in that particular industry I’ve been offered. No offense to those who do. That’s a valuable service. But that wasn’t me. I would have died inside if I had taken that job.
 
So, I made the hardest call of my life at that point. I told him “No but thank you.” He thought I was crazy. He doesn’t anymore, but that’s beside the point. Anyone who chases a crazy dream will have those days when it just seems too hard or maybe even impossible. But the only ones who succeed are the ones who never give up. Ever.
 
I’ve never looked back and I left that lunch that determined to succeed at my dream. If I can do it, you can do it. If you want it bad enough, you can do it.

Author

Hangi Tavakoli is our in-house established and professional music producer with more than 15 years of experience in songwriting, music production, mix and mastering. He has produced more than 1500 and written more than 3000 published songs to-date, including some major hits in international scale.