There’s this idea I keep coming back to: the better you get at writing songs, the better you become as a human being.
Not in a moralising way. Not in a “songwriters are enlightened beings” way. More in the sense that the craft itself shapes you. It puts you through the kind of training that spills over into the rest of your life.
When you practise songwriting regularly, you’re not just sharpening your creative instincts. You’re building habits that make you steadier inside, more aware of yourself, and more connected to the world around you.
Here’s why…
You learn to tell the truth (even when you’d rather look away)
Every decent song has some truth buried inside it. It doesn’t matter if the story is fictional or abstract; it still has to feel real. That means you’re constantly deciding what matters and trimming away anything that rings false.
After a while, that discipline leaks into your daily life. You start catching yourself dodging emotional truth, and you stop letting yourself get away with it.
You develop emotional range
Most people barrel through their days ignoring half their feelings. Songwriters don’t get that option. When you sit down to write, you’re forced to acknowledge what’s going on inside you, even if it’s uncomfortable.
You explore sadness, desire, boredom, anger, nostalgia, joy. You name it. You shape it. You let it move through you. Doing this again and again makes you emotionally stronger and far less reactive.
You sharpen your attention
Songs are tiny little universes. To make one work, you’ve got to pay attention to the details that most people overlook. A single line might hinge on the way someone sighs before they speak or the way light hits a kitchen bench at dawn.
Training your mind to notice these small things doesn’t stop when you put the guitar down. You just start seeing the world in higher resolution.
You get comfortable with imperfection
Not one songwriter on earth writes perfect songs every time. Most first drafts are a mess. But you keep going. You chip away. You fix what you can and learn to live with what you can’t.
This teaches patience. It teaches humility. It teaches self-forgiveness. And that carries you through situations that have nothing to do with music.
You learn to listen
Songwriters are professional listeners, to rhythm, to tone, to phrasing, to human behaviour. You listen for the real story behind someone’s words. You listen for the spark of an idea in a throwaway comment.
That kind of listening makes relationships easier and conversations deeper. It’s the difference between hearing and actually taking someone in.
You become more resilient
Songwriting is filled with highs and lows. Blank pages, false starts, rewrites, breakthroughs, dead ends, accidental magic, it’s all part of the process. When you show up anyway, you build a kind of quiet resilience.
That resilience becomes useful everywhere else: in business, in love, in friendships, in the messy middle of life.
You learn to shape your chaos
Life happens fast and rarely in a straight line. Songwriting gives you a way to sort through the noise and turn it into something meaningful.
When you write regularly, you become less overwhelmed by life because you trust your ability to make sense of things. You develop your own inner compass.
You grow your empathy
Sometimes you write from your own experience. Sometimes you slip into someone else’s skin. Either way, the act of imagining another person’s world builds empathy. It’s a subtle, steady practice of asking, “What would this feel like from the inside?” And once you’ve asked that question a few hundred times in your writing, you start asking it in everyday life.
You strengthen your identity
Every song is a small declaration of who you are. What you care about. What you refuse to ignore. What keeps you up at night.
Over time, this shapes your sense of self. You’re no longer guessing at who you are, you’ve been in conversation with yourself long enough to know.
Songwriting isn’t just about hooks and chord progressions. It’s a discipline that builds character. You get better at your craft, and almost without noticing, you get better at being human.
If you’re serious about writing songs, this is the real payoff: the craft changes you. And the more you lean into it, the more it shapes the way you move through the world, with a little more clarity, a little more courage, and a lot more heart.
Hit me up if you want to discuss this theory of mine further. I reckon it would make for an interesting chat.