"Work Now, Rest When I'm Dead": My Stupid Motto

When I first came up in music, I was hustling all the time. I was doing the job of the manager, publicist, booking agent, and executive producer, as well as being the artist. Additionally, I was funding my dreams, and, since I didn’t want to be homeless, working a full-time job, and often had a second and third part-time gig to supplement. There was barely enough time in the day for all of this, and I had to sacrifice many things. Three major things that I sacrificed were relationships with friends, leisure time, and sleep. Often, I would sleep two to four hours a day for weeks until I just collapsed. At first, the results were remarkable. I was touring regularly and putting out music at a high clip, so naturally, I wore my ability to work for 16-20 hours straight and sleep 3 or 4 hours like a badge of honor; however, there were downsides.

I had migraines that went from occasional and minor to daily and debilitating. Stupidly, I even took pride in being able to keep working by closing one eye and putting ice packs to minimize the pain. Also, one day while in the kitchen with my then-girlfriend, now wife, I started coughing up blood. After going to the doctor and eating bland foods for a month, I was told that drinking 3 pots of coffee/day and only sleeping a few hours was…and I quote the medical opinion…fucking ridiculous. So I drastically cut down on my coffee intake but still kept my poor resting habits. I also ended up with bronchitis or pneumonia a couple of times a year. I didn’t even rest then. In fact, I recorded an album while having pneumonia by putting the mic in the closet in my bedroom. I had to rest every 20 minutes. I remember I played one show at a local spot called The Earl with my band at the time, First Team, with a 102-degree fever.

I thought I had to do it to keep up, but to keep up with who? I was really running at my own pace. I had no investors putting pressure on me. I’d gotten to the point that my family and people around me had seen enough of a sample size to know that what I was doing was legit. I still kept at it though. By the time my second son was born, it got even worse. Most nights I didn’t even come to bed because I fell asleep in front of the computer. Lori would wake me up when she went to work in the morning.

I’d also sacrificed a lot of friendships. Not to say that I stopped being friends with a lot of people - not the ones that counted anyway - but rather I was so busy going after it that I stopped checking on people. I was no longer meeting up for drinks or lunch; in turn, I was left out of the loop of monumental things like the death of their family members, being engaged and married, and meeting significant others. I had some friends that moved, and I didn’t even realize it. It’s not that I wasn’t invited or that we didn’t even speak. More or less, I saw spending time on things that weren’t my dreams as a major inconvenience. I thought that if I stopped to smell the roses, I was letting my dreams down.

Another thing that happens when you’re always tired is that you start making mistakes. I can’t tell you how many times I put out a misspelled press release or uploaded the wrong mix of a song. Once I even released an album with the title spelled wrong.

Also, I became super paranoid in a way. Your mind starts to play tricks on you when you’re tired. I’d been tired every day for nearly 15 years. So, naturally, I thought people were against me. All that did was make me retreat into my shell of fake smiles when around folks, and hustling harder and sleeping less. In the beginning, I had to be a control freak of sorts because I was the one with the dream and drive to fulfill it. You’d think that as I grew and gained more equity in what I was doing, I’d bring more people in to help…wrong. I always found a reason to move on from people. Either they didn’t “understand the vision,” which was true sometimes, but false most of it, or they couldn’t keep the same hours and pace as me. Like, “How dare they want to be mentally and physically healthy?”

I had a motto, “Work now, and rest when I die.” I also remember constantly saying that, “I know that I’ve taken at least seven years off my life with the pace that I go,” and was fine with it.

I can’t say exactly when the breakthrough was, but it happened around 2019. I was talking to people about some of the places I’ve been to and realized that the only things that I did were perform, meet with people to talk business, and hit local coffee shops. Picture going to the Grand Canyon and hating it because you couldn’t post up to sell music. Or going to Beijing and not seeing the Great Wall. Or being in Ireland and walking by 300 and 400-year-old structures and having no curiosity about it. That was me. At some point, I wanted to sit and have coffee with my friends again. I wanted to go to a show and not feel anxious for not being up there performing.

I set office hours for myself and made choices. I planned better. I organized my life in a way that I could go to sleep at a reasonable time and just wake up early instead. I stopped giving myself a list of 30-40 things to get done in a week. Instead, I picked five or six. It’s been a journey but I’ve become exponentially happier.