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Why It's Ruining Everything

It takes a lot to develop a successful music career. You need money for instruments and lessons. You need hours of leisure time daily to practice and develop skills. You need family members to drive you around and take you to lessons and competitions. You need a butler to pick up all your crumpled music-writing sheets and broken guitar strings. None of these things are exactly overflowing in genuinely damaged backgrounds.

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Most working-class Americans can afford, at best, a part-time butler.

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Of course, there are musicians who are born so talented that they don't need any of that and build their own instruments out of the piles of dirty needles in their parents' bedrooms. But successful people from horrible backgrounds usually get out of those situations by doing things that are not typical for that background. This applies to all kinds of successful careers, not just music: If your upbringing really sucked, a big part of becoming successful will involve differentiating yourself as much as possible from the people around you. If you're from a family of meth dealers, you'll have to forgo spending your teenage years learning the meth trade. If your parents are poor alcoholics, you'll need to save up all those beer cans and trade them in for deposit money instead of learning the art of crushing them with your head like everyone else.