Joshua Shelton: Self-Selection and the Transitory Nature of Life

Courtesy of Joshua Shelton

Joshua Shelton describes himself as half of a recording artist who became a public figure by accident. 

“My journey with being a public figure, if you will, started in 2013 by accident, and like all good things that are started be it a business, a nonprofit, anything, it doesn't start because of some huge thing you want it to be, it starts because of an impulse. You have to share something in order to create something,” Shelton said. “Most enterprises that are begun with the intent of how important you want it to be are abandoned pretty quickly or fail.” 

If you begin your guitar journey because you want to be a guitar player, you’re going to run out of steam quickly. 

“The people that say ‘I want to be a guitar player’ or even ‘I want to play guitar,’ the distinction being when driven around ‘I want to do this thing,’ you know, or ‘I want to be the person who does this thing,’ that tank tends to run out of gas real quick, by the time the first calluses are threatening to form or by the time they realize like, ‘man, I've been playing for two months and I'm not getting any better,’” Shelton explained. 

“But if it's, ‘I feel passionately about this, and I just want to share it,’ or when it comes to guitar, not ‘I want to be a guitar player,’ but ‘I want to play guitar, I want to make the sound, I want to make music, I want to make this music and this music happens to be guitar music,’ then I've got a much deeper well of motivation draw from.”

That is how it began for Shelton, he wanted to make music and share his songs. 

“I am about one half of a recording artist, meaning I'm all artist and very little recording,” Shelton said. “I've never developed that side and never made it a big enough priority to find the people and pay them and find the money to pay them to record a lot. So that's a deficiency of mine, that I've learned to live with, and I'm working on.”

While Shelton doesn’t share his music in the traditional sense, he does put his music into the world on impulse in the forms of social media and soundcloud. 

“It was kind of hit and miss and then I finally joined Instagram quite late, like early 2017, maybe late 2016 I don't know something like that, and, you know, enjoyed the feedback loop there,” he said. “I think, like most creators, that's really kind of what we live on. I mean, who doesn't enjoy a good like?”

For him, it was more about the feedback he received from his posts. 

“It was more of a feedback loop of people commenting and knowing that they enjoyed the song or knowing that they enjoyed the tip or that something was meaningful or made a difference in their day,” he said. 

Tiktok has been monumental for Shelton in that way. 

“Half my content these days is responding to questions, which is beautiful, because it means that I'm helping somebody directly with something, I'm not guessing, which is amazing,” he said. 

Shelton really began taking his social media presence and his podcast seriously in late 2018 and early 2019. 

“It's all essentially a method of trying to future proof my existence, my livelihood,” he said. “Everything that can be replaced is going to be replaced if it can be done, cheaper, faster, less humanly, that's going to happen.”

“I don't have oodles of real world skills, but fortunately for me, in the long term, my skills tend to be in the human arena,” he said, explaining that his skills are less likely to be taken by artificial intelligence. 

Courtesy of Joshua Shelton

“For me, there will be an app, may already be [an app], that can teach someone guitar much more efficiently than I ever could. There will be programs and technologies to troubleshoot someone's vision issues and their new glasses, much better than I ever could. That's not a question,” he said. “So for me, I'm looking at all that, and I have to realize, okay, I can't be a guitar teacher, I have to be Josh.”

In response to this, Shelton only takes students who want to learn from him, specifically. His goal isn’t to teach full-time, but to be self-selective of his students and keep a small pool of students who want to learn from him

“I have quit taking students who want a guitar teacher, I only take students who want to learn from Josh,” he said. “I've always had a lot of self-selection with my students. I have a rule now that I'll teach anybody, any age; I'll teach a four year old if they're paying for their lessons.”

He believes if his student doesn’t have skin in the game, without that impulse of “I actually want this” from the student, then it’s not a good use of his time to teach them. 

“That sounds entitled, you know, but it's not, and the reason I know it's not an elitist thing is I don't mind teaching ‘Johnny Row Your Boat Ashore,’ I don't mind teaching. ‘Hey, Joe’ 1000 times,” he said. 

“I don't care if somebody even picks up a guitar in between lessons. It's better if they do, for them, but what I care about is that you want it,” he said. “I'm not the teacher who's gonna smack your hand. I'm gonna say ‘okay, well, what can we do with that?’ Because even if it's not a huge part of their life, even if they're not, you know, advancing in any incredible way, the fact is: that 45 minutes or that hour, means a lot to them, and they don't take it for granted.”

He does not advertise himself as a guitar teacher, he doesn’t encourage people to sign up for lessons with him. 

“A lot of that is my personal deficiencies as a business person, I just don't have my shit together in any area of my life, but it's wound up being good because it's, again, self-selection,” he said.

When growing a business you make the process as frictionless as possible so people can impulsively sign up for your product or service. 

“I’m the opposite,” Shelton said. 

The email is in his bio, but they have to take the time to email him to inquire about possible lessons. 

“So the other beauty there is that they're so self-selected that it really helps displace a lot of my imposter syndrome as a teacher,” he said, explaining that he often worries if what he is doing is helpful or if he is teaching people concepts in the wrong order. 

“Most of the people I teach are adults, and they've been playing for some time, and their goal is to understand better what they're doing and to just play better and be able to think less and have more fun,” Shelton said. “When they self-selected that hard, they've come to me and they've been following me for however long, they already liked what I had to say; I don't have to worry that I didn't teach them the right way.” 

Shelton is creating an imprint on those who encounter his content on the internet. 

“Before the written word, you could only hear of someone by being in their physical presence or through word of mouth, but even then, the person existed beyond their physical presence, because they made a communication imprint on those around them, some more than others,” he said. 

“The internet is an amplifier of word of mouth, if we make it that, and through the substantial benefits- to be conservative- of the internet, and what it allows us to do in terms of word of mouth, I have made myself bigger than I have any right to be, and have had some good fortune of timing mixed in with a lot of effort.”

Shelton does not take the impact of his influence lightly. 

“I have some influence, and that's incredibly precious and frightening to me. So as that has grown little by little, and I see that there are people who take what I have to say seriously about music, about guitars, about whatever- my overall sense of responsibility: A. grows and B. grows in the direction of positivity,” he said. 

He feels his responsibility is to use his influence to promote something that he believes is unequivocally good. 

“That, for me, has been encouraging people to play music, to make music, to sing, to understand music, all of the things to encourage people,” he said. 

This is especially true for his viewers who are early in their musical development. 

“If I look at a person's musical progress, like the progress of the plant, the conditions when they are in the germination to sapling stage, are much more influential than anything anyone could do for that plant when it is you know, 20 years old, much less 200,” he said. 

“Meaning, for a musician, that somebody who has been playing for fewer than two years- to use an arbitrary metric- is highly influenceable for good or bad, for encouragement or discouragement.”

Because of this it is important for Shelton to influence them in a positive way that creates a sort of armor against discouragement. For many that discouragement will come in the form of people on the internet or those closest to you making negative statements about your musical progress. 

Courtesy of Joshua Shelton

For Shelton, much of his position in life- including his desire to positively impact others- is due to his preoccupation with where he came from and where he is going. 

“I have always been somewhere between preoccupied and obsessed with the transitory nature of life, that is to say, death,” Shelton said. “In the south, Baptist churches, by and large, are mostly concerned with the afterlife, and with salvation, with substitutionary atonement…It's kind of an equation that was never talked about in my church.”

He explained that other five year olds already had the idea that earth really didn’t matter and that it’s only a step between birth and the afterlife. 

Shelton’s peers believed there was an afterlife and that “there's a very good place and a very bad place, and there's no in between, and you had better be really sure that you go to the one you want to go to, and not the one you don't want to go to.”

Ultimately the actions of his peers didn’t matter, only what they believed did. That was what would determine their eternal fate. 

“And so you get this incredible preoccupation with belief and no real metrics for like, how do I know that I believe it for real? Well, if you're asking that question, you must not believe it. Oof.  Okay, so we need to banish doubt. So that's the real thing is that doubt is unwelcome. Doubt really is the gateway to hell,” he explained. “How do I avoid doubt when I can’t ask questions?”

Shelton was not exposed to this kind of belief in his own church. 

“I don't know how much that influenced me or didn't because my church wasn't that way,” he said. 

His church focused on the importance of loving and serving others and discouraged selfishness, but he still found himself filled with doubt. 

“I was nothing but doubt and questions and just overly aware that death was real, life was temporary. That within that set up, it doesn't feel like anything that happens while you're alive matters very much,” he said. 

Even then, Shelton had an overwhelming sense that what we know as life is actually a very small portion of what is.

“I was very interested in where did I come from before I was here, as much as after. Because if there is an after, there had to be a before,” he said. “Everything feels pretty pointless when you're, you know, five years old and younger, and feeling like, well, it doesn't really matter.”

This is a balancing act of extremes for Shelton. 

“I'm gonna die and I'm not going to be remembered very long. Even if I got really lucky, and was remembered for, you know, 1000 years, it's not a very long time,” he said. “It's really remarkable that I'm here, and you have this tiny glimpse of consciousness. 100 years, if you're really lucky, or unlucky, however, you want to look at it.”

“There's a moment of being like, ‘oh, my God, I have an existence,’ I have this tiny possibility of impacting things in a way that is so infinitesimal that it can't matter, but at the same time, it's the only chance that I have to matter, and so in that sense, it could not be any more important.”

“So balancing those extremes is a place that I spend a lot of time in,” he said. 

This concludes part one of a three part series with Joshua Shelton. Stay tuned for more on his journey, learning guitar, being kind, managing mental health, and more. 

To keep up with Josh meanwhile, click here.