Where to Find Motivation for Gigs That You Don't Like

Making money with being a media composer comes with one problem: you need to make money with being a media composer. As trivial as this might seem, it has massive influences on how you need to work.

I know quite a few composers who made the switch from hobby to professional composer quite late in their life and who suddenly found themselves in a different reality. And this reality includes working on projects that are annoying, bad in quality, morally problematic, with annoying clients or a combination of those properties just because you need the money they are paying.

There is a sometimes extensive period in the career of a professional composer where you can't afford to say no to projects that you don't like and where the path of you career is basically depending on accident and luck. There will be a slow exit out of this state eventually but the occasional "can't say no to that" project might still pop up.

It requires a specific mindest to motivate oneself for projects that don't bring a lot of joy and sparking creativity in such problematic starting conditions is even trickier. Personally, it would be too much to say that I for myself have found a strategy that works in every case. There are occasional situations that massively throw me off. One of these pet peeves are clients who request changes without any leads to what they want to be changed and why. But for some cases, I have worked out strategies that work for me.

One of the easier things for me to get motivated for are projects that are of questionable artistic value. I source my personal motivation from the attitude of approaching such a thing as a challenge to shape even the most pedestrian source material into music where I find something interesting in. Sometimes these are things that only I notice, sometimes I do a bold move and add a drastic idea and try to sell it to the client. Of course, it really depends on who you are working with in how far you can go with this approach but working on nerdy details in an otherwise boring project can help to keep up the sanity and motivation. 

Other things are harder to digest. For instance with the above mentioned clients with bad feedback attitude I just switch on auto pilot and try to get done with it as quickly as possible.

However, one of the biggest motivational factors for me are to see such projects as "compensation". For some, it works to simply be motivated by the money they will earn and what they can do with it, which sometimes also works for me. But more often I source motivation from the thought that if I do this project now, I can afford to work on a more fun (but mostly badly paid) project later. I always have several such pet projects on hold to work on when I have the time for and they really help me a lot to get through projects that I barely enjoy. Of course, I can say this from a privileged standpoint where I can generally afford to make room for such projects and have enough well paying gigs that allow me to do such pet projects. But I think it is generally a good strategy to build yourself such islands of motivation to get through a frustrating project.

Of course life situations differ drastically and it also depends for instance on how many mouths you have to feed from your work or how your living costs are in general. Some composers hardly get by in spite of working as much as possible while others have the luxury of cherry picking the projects they want to work on but practically any composer knows the feeling of needing to work on a project that they do not enjoy at all but need to do because of the money. Finding personal strategies to get through such projects is essential.