Setting goals for your music career

What if you begin your music career thinking you love music so much; you don’t care whether you get paid…

Only to realize one day you want to start making money from your passion…?

Or, what if you think you’re getting paid great money to do the work you love to do…

Only to realize you’ve got a long way to go to create the career and life of your dreams?

Dreaming Too Small

If there’s any doubt that the scenarios laid out above are made up, let me tell you…

This stuff happens all the time.

Now, don’t get me wrong.

Some musicians are perfectly content being able to make music and play the local bar. I’ve performed with some of those musicians once or twice myself.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. At all!

But there are also many musicians that one day wake up to see that they aren’t where they want to be.

Drummer Matt Starr was one of those musicians and I had a great conversation with him last year. You can have a listen here (I DARE you to listen — it’s powerful):

Again, you can aspire to whatever level makes the most sense to you.

And that journey will be full of challenges and surprises …

But I can tell you from experience it SUCKS to wake up one day to discover you’ve been dreaming much too small, because now you have less time to accomplish the things you now know you want to accomplish.

If You’re Going to be Setting Goals Anyway…

I used to listen to Brian Tracy’s The Science of Self-Confidence (affiliate link) religiously in my car.

One of the things he talks about is the fact that if you make to-do lists and use them, you will accomplish 80% of what’s on the list, every single time.

And you know what’s crazy?

I proved this to myself.

Not right away, but over time, I would look back on my to-do lists (generally I would make a new one every single week), to find that I had accomplished 80% of everything I had written down.

That’s right — I could literally go back, look over old to-do lists, and check items off, even if I had forgotten about them, or never got around to them when I originally intended to.

Much to my surprise, goal lists worked almost exactly the same way!

The point is simple.

If you’re going to set goals, set big goals. If you’re going to dream, dream big.

You won’t know what’s possible unless you stretch that dream muscle of yours.

Don’t Concern Yourself with the How or When

In 2011, I was introduced to Kevin Trudeau’s Your Wish is Your Command (affiliate link).

Now, say what you will about Trudeau. I’m not one of his disciples, but I have learned a thing or two from the man. That’s undeniable.

Anyway, as I began learning about the law of attraction, I had a bit of an “aha” moment.

Virtually everyone tells you to set SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, Timely).

I’m not saying the system is flawed, but it never resonated with me, nor did it lead to desired results.

Trudeau says there are certain questions that let the air right out of your goal balloon. They are:

“How?” and “when?”

When we set big goals, our human tendency is to go to the negative.

“I don’t know how I’m going to do this.”

“I’m scared.”

“It’s overwhelming.”

That’s because we’re focused on the how. If we had faith in ourselves and the universe, we would know that abundance is everywhere, and all we need to do is focus on the “what” and the “why”.

As for when, as it turns out, we’re not that smart. Goals can be accomplished in a multitude of ways, and we never know what opportunities might cross our path. Goals might take longer or they might not take as long as you think. Rarely do they happen in the exact time frame we set for them.

Key point: How and when are goal killers.

Okay, so it’s Magic?

This is logically where our human brain leads us next.

“Okay, so the process works as if by magic. That means I don’t need to do anything!”

Again, nothing could be further from the truth.

Remember what I said: “your responsibility is the why.”

When you know why you want a certain thing, the motivation to get it naturally increases.

You think about it all the time. You can almost feel it.

You can’t have it go from the head to the heart, or more accurately, from the heart to the head (I’ll talk more about this another time), without it impacting your actions.

Your thoughts affect your feelings. Your feelings turn into actions. Your actions become habits. Your habits produce your reality.

BOOM!

You Could Settle for Less

Or you could tap into your unlimited human capacity to dream, imagine, act, and manifest.

No, it doesn’t happen as if by magic.

Setting goals and achieving them is a process.

Meditation, dream boarding, journaling, and so on, are just tools that help us focus on the what and the why rather than the how or when.

And, if you find yourself asking how …

A better question you could be asking is “who?”

Remember — we live on a planet of nearly eight billion people. Someone must have the answer, or at least be able to point you in the right direction.

There is a spiritual or philosophical aspect to goal setting.

But undoubtedly, there is a practical side to it too.

That’s why I wrote The Music Entrepreneur Code. You can learn more about it here.

Originally published at https://davidandrewwiebe.com on August 13, 2020.