spark said: "be honest with yourself.
put the time in.
be extraordinary. try it.
find a critic you can trust when you cannot trust yourself.
do what you FEEL. Not what you WANT.

Write whats cool. Write whats not cool. Try it all. Do everything. Don't stop. Find yourself.

Play live. Talk with people. Challenge yourself. Empty some rooms. Fill some rooms. Kill the party. Throw the party. Try new things. Live in the moment.

You're not going to sell a million records (well, you might) so just make something you like. If you cant make something you like.. you're hopeless.

Suceed. Fail. Win. Lose. Rinse. Repeat."

saladnoise said: "
My advice:
Start by consciously stopping getting new gear or software. Decide not to change your setup for 1 year at least. Program the fï ck out of what you have, and when you want to go out on Saturday night, sit back down and program more. Program all day Sunday and forget to even read email. After work on Monday eve, sit down and program tracks, repeat this every night of the week. ignore online forums and free software and magazines and spend that time programming new tracks. Always finish your tracks. Beat a dead horse-->force yourself to reinvent/manipulate a failing track until it has redeemable aspects and then is completed. Exploit the equipment and software you have and then, when you think you've done everything you can do, assign yourself the task of coming up with 50 new tricks with your current setup that no one would believe possible. Then follow through with making music exploiting these new techniques one by one. While listenning to all genres of music, make attempts at emulating or covering as many as possible, from Cole Porter to the Sex Pistols to polka.. Make your equipment sound like live players and then turn around and explore being as stiff and subtley-shifting as possible.

Avoid socializing and going outside. Everytime you browse records or music, write down 5-10 addresses to send demos to and then send them well labelled demos with no fancy art; just solid music. Email the labels to verify that they got the demos."