How to become a Superstar

Today you can’t say you don’t know how to do it, the information is out there, all around you. Be it here on Medium or YouTube, you can easily find any and every information you need in order to achieve this, so nobody can tell me they don’t know. If you say that, then it means you deliberately don’t want to know, or you don’t want to accept what is being told to you. I’m just going to add to an already big database of information.

In this article I’m going to talk about how to become a superstar in the entertainment industry, from music right up to movies, this could also apply to other sectors so listen closely. The first thing you need obviously is passion because in order to achieve any feat, you’ll need that gas to push you to the top. Passion is what makes people good at their jobs, and all the names you can list out of the top of your head are all people who had a tremendous amount of passion for what ever they were doing. Was it music, was it movies, was it comedy etc you can’t do all of that without an enormous amount of passion. The first question you should get out of the way is

“are you doing this for money or are you sincerely passionate about this?”

This question is pertinent because it determines how far you are going to go, you don’t need to be a superstar to get yourself out of financial difficulties, matter of fact there are countless artists whom you’ve never heard of but who earn an income from their music in the shadows, that's not the path we are going to be talking about in this article.

Information isn’t the problem.

To begin, I’ll like to say that information is no longer the limiting factor for anything or anyone anymore, there was a time when we could only get our information from TV or from ear to mouth, we didn’t even know if there was a music producer next door or what it took to make music, but in modern days, all the information we could possibly need is found just behind a “search” button.

An invaluable skill you’ll need to take you to the top is the one of searching for the right information, basically everybody requires this skill. You’ll need to know a lot of things, be it educational material, informational material or inspirational content. The way this is going to help you is by showing you how to analyze and interprete information, you will be able to see people who have done what you are doing before you and analyze how they did it so that you can replicate the same process with some optimization. You can’t just live in a bubble and shut the world off, you need to understand the current times and adapt to them, that passes through know how to search for information in this digital world.

What you need to do

Lets take a niche like the music industry, how could you become a superstar starting literally from nothing. Here are the steps I’ll follow;

1. Get a Job: Find a job which helps you earn a living, pay for your basic needs while sponsoring your musical equipments. Ideally it should be 5/7 days and not too demanding mentally.
2. Get a Mic: You are a musician, so your greatest asset is your voice, you need to be able to get the best voice possible so get the highest quality mic in your means.
3. Get a Smartphone: They aren’t the greatest invention of the 21st century for nothing, you are carrying on you so much potential without even realizing it. Get a decent smartphone and install all the apps you need for recording audio and videos, plus the social media apps you need.
4. Get on TikTok: You should get on every possible social media app starting from the most popular to the least popular and post on all of them simultaneously (without wearing yourself out too much). In the past you needed a whole recording studio to make music, but today, TikTok and a mic are all you need.
5. Create Content: Sing until you become the star you are meant to be, slowly build your following while simultaneously getting better and refining your style. The original you is never going to be the best version of you, that version you are going to discover on the way.
6. Get noticed: You have to create content until you get noticed, it could take 1k Videos or it could take 10k videos but as long as you stay consistent while getting better, you’ll definitely build your niche and get noticed.
7. Sign Contracts & Get Monetized: At this point you might have to sign in to a label, get some brand deals etc, finding the right one only comes through research. You don’t even need a label to become a star these days, followers are your source of revenue either ways, and there are independent artists doing pretty well by themselves.
8. Release Consistently: Continue putting out the music and basically outworking the competition, the more music you put out, the bigger your following becomes. Focus on building your following and your brand, thats what will take you to the next level, once you have a good number of followers you will be too big to ignore, irrespective of what you are doing (good or bad).
9. Stay Updated: Times are definitely going to change, things might be done differently and maybe some words my get outdated, so you want to ensure you keep up with the times.
10. Become a Star: Being a star isn’t about singing with the likes of Micheal Jackson or being better than anybody else. You are already a star for the people who follow you and once you make a good number of people following you then you become a well recognized Star.

The Cost

Hard work

Listing these steps all like this might make you feel like its easy, I’m not going to say its difficult either because it really depends on how big your passion is. There are people passionate enough to work all night, while others get bored after the first 30 minutes. All of these steps will require varying degrees of hard work, it might come easier to some people, while for others it might be harder. For example, there are artists who can write a song in seconds, while others might need a couple of months just to finish a song, while others even have songwriters, so don’t look at the difficulty from the point of view of you having to do everything but instead you finding a way to do everything.

Talent

A big part of what it means to be a star is your personality, your lyrics could be trash but the vibe and the personality you bring are what makes you who you are, build your brand around something you have total control over. People will learn to love that one thing and enjoy watching it evolve into something great. There was a time when you needed to go to music school in order to work in the music industry, but today we are seeing artists sprout even from the deepest ghettos. The definition of talent has evolved through the years, its no longer just about being able to sing the correct notes but rather being able to entertain, as long as you are doing that then you are on the right track.

Competition & Consistency

There are also a million other people doing the exact same thing you are already doing, but that doesn’t mean there is no space for you. I’ve never seen a town with just a single restaurant, there are enough people out there for you to coexist with all your competition, even if you are doing the exact same thing. We tend to fear competition while we should embrace it, the most difficult part will be to stay consistent and that's where most people fail. it takes time to build a brand, to get followers and to become better, unfortunately its that patience that most people lack, they either get tired of waiting or they don’t better themselves.

Expectation

Don’t inflate your expectations bigger than they should be, set challenging milestones for yourself and strive to attain them. Don’t just post a song hoping that it touches a million people instantly, that won’t happen (generally), you have to go sequentially, reach out to 10 persons, then 20 persons, then 50 persons…. Like every other business in the world, you have to listen to feedback and better yourself in order to expand.

Find inspiration

You might find yourself running out of inspiration but that shouldn’t be the case, the truth is that there is already so much that has been done out there, all you need to do is look at the other content to find your own inspiration, whether its videos, music, comedy, images etc There is no shortage of inspiration, all you have to do is copy it and personalize it with your style.

Setbacks

Everything won’t obviously go right, there are going to be challenges along the way, I can’t even start to imagine the difficulties you might meet in your journey, the one thing which helps you through that is the passion you have for what you are doing, thats what should always keep you going. The way you deal with setbacks is by always looking for the right information and surrounding yourself with the right team.

Upsides vs downsides

Very often we wish for a lifestyle that we may not fully understand, you may discover in this journey the price to pay for that celebrity, it mustn’t necessarily be anything spooky like cults, but it might be sacrifices you have to make with your time, relationships and interests, you may end up becoming a slave to the thing you once loved. There are a lot of artists who rose to the top and now are no longer spoken about, that's not because they fell off (necessarily) but It's because they had their moment, they got the feeling they were after, and now they decided to move on to something else. You should be humble enough to weigh the upsides vs the downsides and when its time to pass the microphone.

Conclusion

Well these are the steps anybody out there can take to make it to the top, writing them down doesn’t mean it's going to be easy, for some they will get stuck on the first step of finding a job, for others they will get stuck on the step of building their brand and some might not even start all, but at least after this article, you can’t say you didn’t know how to do it.

Thanks for reading

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