Let me tell you about a time when I learned a lesson about life. A couple of weeks ago, I began creating music; I was just starting as a producer, and I had no prior knowledge of anything about music theory. I was going in to the business blind. The first song I made is called ReRun. ReRun is a slow rap instrumental about 4½ minutes long. It is a song with piano, snare, and a few other instruments in the background. But it is played in reverse which is why I called it ReRun. It is a rather nice instrumental song with a beautiful melody, and a good beat is set by the reverse snare drum hits. ReRun was my pride and joy, and I posted it wherever I could, starting with Facebook. I went on my tablet right after I posted, swiping across my home screen, desperately trying to find facebook. After I found it, I logged in, and refreshed the page. I was really nervous about the reactions I would get. I clicked on my post and I was stunned. Almost instantly I got 3 likes and a few comments saying “Wow, Cam this is good.” and “Nice job”. I was so happy that other people liked it. I kept scrolling through and refreshing until there was this one person who thought differently about my music. That person started commenting bad things about my music. That was the day I got my very first hater. This hater was relentlessly trying to bring me down, saying things like “this sounds like cr*p, the music is cr*p, the beat is cra*, and your producing quality is cr*p.” These are just a few of the things this hater said to me. I asked him “Can’t you give me some credit for the things I have done?!?” He replied, “No, I can’t give credit to something that is not good.” That cut me deep, right down to my soul. Normally I try not to let these kinds of things get to me but this was no ordinary hater. The hater happened to be my best friend and inspiration for creating music. This really hurt me because I thought he was going to be my biggest helper, but turned out to be my biggest hater. This sent me into a state of sadness that was not easily shaken. I didn’t post anything after that for about a week. During that week I was contemplating whether or not I really should produce anymore. I gave up. I quit. I realized that he could be right that I wasn’t capable of doing it. It was my darkest hour, I felt I could never do it, I am not good enough, people will never fully approve, that this is a waste of time, I am a failure, people won’t like it. But they’re wrong. I realized that it doesn’t matter what others think. They aren’t here to stop us from accomplishing our goal, they are here to motivate us to do better. I know that I want to do this, and I know that I can do it. I told the hater, “thank you for giving me more motivation.” 

     The next day I spent 13 hours creating my next song. It was called “Haters...BE WARNED!!!” It was my first dubstep song. It starts out with a cool intro that progressively gets louder and leads into some angry hip-hop beats and about halfway into the song it stops, and it turns into some crazy dubstep. It is to this day my best song. I was proud to post this one to facebook. The caption under the link to the song read, “To all haters who doubt me, I made this for you. You all can hate as much as you want, but know this: I am SpeakerRemixGuy (my music name), and I am here to stay. Your hate will only make me stronger and motivate me to be be better. You can’t bring me down today, tomorrow, or any other day, because I’m not going anywhere.” I never heard anything bad from the hater again. My goal was to prove to people that music can come from anyone, and anywhere, in any form, and now I have accomplished that goal, it it was all because of the hater trying to bring me down.

     I used to be the person who would give up when I was told I couldn’t, but now I don’t give up unless I am 100% certain that I can’t do it. I am a person who does not give up. I became this way because of the hater trying to bring me down. It did not come without struggling with the hate and it felt like it was just people trying to put me down, but it ultimately helped me to become a person who doesn’t give up For a long time I wondered why that was the case, thinking at first that it was just people being mean. But know I know differently. People put other’s ideas down so that they can feel better about themselves. My friend was hating on me because he was jealous that i was already doing better than he did in his first day, in my first week. So to make himself feel better, he started putting me down.

     This is something that happens to a lot of people.Martin Luther King Jr. followed his dream of civil rights for all people including african americans and he had thousands of people hating on him. It is the same for many people, we all have haters who try to bring us down. And it is our job to prove him wrong and accomplish my goal. This experience taught me to follow my dreams no matter what anyone else thinks about it.

     I now look at the world with a new perspective. I now know that there are people with ideas and with those ideas are the haters trying to bring them down.I now know that people need haters. They don’t want them, but in order to fully accomplish your goal, you need the negative criticism so you can improve and motivate yourself to achieve your goal.