SERIOUSLY? THAT WAS YOUR GOAL?
When I was young I wanted to be a rock star. Nothing special, just a rock star. I worked hard at it for years and eventually realized that dream. Or at least I think I did, as the dream was overly vague. It was mostly visions of touring with my band, living in buses and hotel rooms, playing shows for screaming fans, all while it paid my bills. Those boxes were each checked on the most functional level, so I like to tell myself that I realized my dream.
When you’re 12 years old you aren’t worried about defining all the details of a dream. Would my rockstar life include private jets? Longevity? How about a roadie or two? Not only was my dream ill-defined, I didn’t understand the goals required to accomplish it.
SERIOUSLY? THAT WAS YOUR GOAL?
By the time I was fifteen I thought that getting a record deal was the goal. That was the event that would give me the hits, fans, and arena tours. It’s embarrassing to think back on now. Getting a record deal is no different than being signed by the Boston Red Sox. Sure, it’s a great milestone, and in itself is extremely difficult to accomplish. But you could be in that organization for years and never play a meaningful ball game. The record company could easily scrap your project before your album is even released. The record contract is simply a very nice incremental step. Someone with power to make things happen believes in you. They want to “be in the [Your Name] Business”. The record deal is just an opportunity.
I SQUANDERED MINE
My “goal” of getting a record deal happened in 1993. It was a modest label with modest resources, but we were so overcome with joy that we didn’t care. Our albums were in stores all across the country and our song was on the radio. We got fan mail from places we had never been to or even knew existed. A couple of them even had lipstick marks -how rock star is that? But after our marketing budget expired and we failed to rise from the bottom of the radio charts, our CDs and cassettes began to find their way to the discount bin or back to the label. Crates full of unwanted albums stored in a warehouse like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
We assumed that this failure was because our label didn’t value or prioritize us among their other artists. Or that they didn’t have the resources to properly break out an artist of our type. In retrospect, the blame was on us. We weren’t hustling at all. We weren’t out there starving on the road. Maybe we were waiting for the phone to ring? I had mistaken an opportunity for a goal, and as a result, I had wasted my best chance so far at achieving my dream. I had not strategized this nearly well enough when I was 12 years old. What was I thinking?
BUT SOMETIMES OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS TWICE
Lucky for me I don’t give up too easily, and I do learn from failures on occasion. For the next couple of years we retooled the band and worked our tails off developing a sound and a personality. We developed a live show that people really connected with, and took it on the road as often and far as possible. I had learned that getting a record deal wasn’t a goal. Making a great band was.
Record companies are attracted to great bands like pigs are to mud. We were eventually offered a deal, this time by a big label. It’s a funny thing about experience, because now we knew what to expect. This time we didn’t think that we had just “made it”. Yes, we were a better band but we knew this time around that the ball was in our hands to make something of this new opportunity.
The story of the band doesn’t end there. We both seized and squandered plenty more opportunities along the way. I learned that a dream requires accomplishing a series of goals, and that each goal requires seizing a series of opportunities. I could have probably read that in a book when I was 15, but I prefer to learn things myself. The hard, slow, and painful way.
