Malcolm Gladwell shares an interesting part of the Beatles’ story in The Outliers (the book where he proposes his 10,000 hours rule), and cites their ability to quickly rack up thousands of hours worth of practice as a key part of what made them a successful group. During their time in Hamburg, the Beatles routinely performed 5 or 6 ninety minute sets each day, seven days a week. Naturally, they got really good, really fast. Just in their live performance time, they were getting 52 hours (minimum) of practice each week, and it doesn’t seem like a stretch to imagine that they spent even more hours learning and writing new songs offstage.
This gig was really important for their development, but they were still getting paid a mere £2.50 per day per person. The important thing, though, was that this was enough to live on while they were building their chops. Their goal was to play music and get really good at that, not to rent fancy apartments.
A key inflection point for aspiring artists and entrepreneurs is when they can quit their day job and focus on building their dream career full-time. Rather than putting in a mere 15 hours a week, this frees them up to regularly devote 40-50 (or more!) hours, leading to a much more rapid rate of development than they were working with before.
Most of the development to becoming successful at anything is invisible and thankless. The path to success (where success is being able to support yourself with exclusively your work of choice) looks a lot like an exponential chart, where you have a long, flat, linear lag phase before hitting an inflection point at which you can focus on your dream full time.
(image from https://a16zcdixon.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/screen-shot-2015-05-12-at-5-46-11-pm1.png)
The goal is to hit that success point as soon as possible and buy back your own time. Once that is done, you reach a virtuous cycle. By quitting your day job, you gain a phenomenal amount of time that you can devote to growing much more rapidly. This growth means offering greater value to the world (whether higher quality to the same audience or reaching a bigger audience, or both). This enhanced value offering means you can get paid more. Getting paid more means you can use your time even more efficiently (such as by hiring other people to handle more routine tasks). You’re off the ground, you’re flying, you’re on your way. You’ve got traction!
There are a lot of things that are hard to control when it comes to reaching this inflection point, although there is one easy thing to control. It’s hard (not impossible) to influence the word of mouth surrounding your work, it’s hard to improve your quality and make something people like better, it’s hard to develop skills, it’s hard to grow your audience. These things take a lot of effort, and have no guarantee of success. By contrast, it is easy to cut your living expenses to such a low level that you need only a few hundred dollars of income a month to live on. If you can guarantee that you can live cheaply, you can shift that inflection point down and to the left, effectively lowering the bar of success to an earlier attainable level. Thus you can eliminate your need for a day job and start dumping those dozens of hours into a job of your choosing.
Perhaps it seems unreasonable to put that amount of hard work into your goal, while simultaneously practicing the utmost frugality. But consider this, the Beatles were playing such marathon-length sets at strip clubs that waitresses would give them Preludin (a very powerful, now illegal stimulant) to keep them awake during performances. After the show, the band went home to a shabby pig-sty of an apartment before passing out and waking up the next day to do it again. And they did this for over two years! What possible excuse other than lack of dedication could any of the rest of us possibly have?
If you want to make it work, need to make it work, find a way to go full-time as soon as possible. Find the dingiest, cheapest living space available, work the longest hours imaginable, and get shit done.