This is Industry Insider: a weekly 5-minute brief with key news, interviews, advice, smart picks & follows, built for artists and industry folks alike.

☝️ ONE BIG THING

My therapist said something that punched me in the gut:

"You're not a writer who has to raise kids. You're a stay-at-home dad who gets to write."

I wanted to fight her on it. Because admitting that feels like admitting defeat. Like I've lost something I was supposed to become.

But here's what I'm learning: You can't build anything real while you're busy resenting your actual life.

I've spent years fighting the interruptions. The mornings blown on cat doors and YouTube whitelists. The late nights building systems at 9:20pm because that's the only time the house is quiet. The constant pull between "real work" and everything else that makes real work possible.

And the whole time, I've been carrying this low-grade panic that I'm a pretender. That using AI to accelerate my systems makes me a fraud. That if I'm not suffering in the right way, I'm not really doing it.

That's the trap.

We've been sold this story that real artists are supposed to transcend their circumstances. That if you're any good, you'll find a way to ignore the dishes, the laundry, the kid crying at your legs. That discipline means overpowering your actual life until it submits.

But that's not discipline. That's self-abandonment.

At V13, we built our first value, Vita, on Love & Logic. Human first. Reality second. Fix what you can, accept what you can't, and stop burning yourself down trying to be someone you're not in a life you don't have.

The truth is, I am a stay-at-home dad who gets to write. Who gets to run V13. Who gets to build systems that work when I'm interrupted for the 47th time before noon.

And once I stopped fighting that, something shifted. The resentment loosened. The work got easier. Not because the circumstances changed, but because I stopped waiting for my "real life" to start.

This is the real life. The one with the cat doors and the late-night system builds and the fear that you're faking it. The one where you use every tool available (yes, including AI) because the goal isn't to prove you can suffer beautifully. The goal is to make something that matters with the life you actually have.

So if you're reading this while feeling behind, while wondering if you count, while fighting the gap between who you are and who you thought you'd be:

Stop fighting. Start building.

Your real life is happening right now. It's messy and interrupted and nothing like you planned. And it's the only one you get to work with.

And now, on to the rest of the newsletter.

🗞 INDUSTRY NEWS

💯 INDUSTRY INTERVIEW

💬 INDUSTRY ADVICE

🎧 INDUSTRY PODCASTS

William J. Sullivan: “Life isn’t always fair. If you want something, you got to go get it.”

In this conversation, Producer, Mixer, Engineer and writer, William J. Sullivan shares his journey from a young musician influenced by family and culture to a successful music producer.

Got new music to share?

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