This incident happened a few months ago. One day as I was looking at my YouTube and SoundCloud accounts, I had a sudden realization that I am losing my interest in singing cover songs and songs that don't say any story. I felt like a factory worker on the assembly line producing like items on my music page, where every song of mine said the same thing about me - I am a good singer.

As much as I felt grateful for this fact, I also felt the need to move out of my comfort zone and realign with the safety zone. That means I need to be in the ‘student of music’ mode, always pushing my boundaries, making mistakes, often failing, learning from them, and repeating the whole process again and again.

If I wanted to be in the game, I just could not afford to be complacent about this fact - I am an above average singer and I am going to remain one. I needed to keep learning even if that questioned my competency level.

I was thinking of what should I do next when I heard this excerpt in the audiobook version of The Icarus Deception.

What should I do next?
The answers don’t matter. At all.
You need the experience of repeated failure.
You need the good taste to see your work for what it is, and you earn that taste not only not by emulating those who made art before you but by failing, by repeatedly discovering what works and what doesn’t.

I figured that one way to see things differently would be to educate myself on music rather than just performing. I enrolled myself in a Western Classical Piano lessons a few months ago. I am seeing Indian music through the lens of an instrumentalist now, in addition to that of a vocalist's, and it’s refreshing.

At the end of the day, the point is to keep playing and be in the game rather than bothering on the outcomes. I choose the privilege of playing the music game as long as I can.