Where Are You, Where Are You Going, and Most Important, How Will You Get There?

In order to really accomplish anything, you have to first decide what it is you want to accomplish. That either sounds dumb or self- evident to you depending on your point of view, but stay with me for a minute. Often, if you ask a musician or band about their career goals they can’t define them. They might say “We want to be stars” or “I want to play my music for people” or even “We want to win a Juno award.” While those might be dreams, only the last one is a goal; although how realistic it is for that particular band might be up to debate. (See the link at the bottom of this post if you are interested in my definition of dreams versus goals).

Even if an artist or band has specific goals (e.g. winning a Juno award); if you try to “drill down” from those goals to the plan to achieve the goals – quite often there isn’t a plan. I think that everyone knows this – you know that you need goals and a plan to achieve them. But you might not know how to get started. Either that or you view goals and plans as something you do to get grant funding; not something you use to manage your career. But plans are essential if you want to achieve anything.

Think of your career like a road trip. Generally if you are going on a road trip – short or long, you have a specific destination in mind. Occasionally you might just get in the car to “go somewhere” (come on … we have all gone on those late night left/right tours or was that just a small town Ontario thing that I did?), but that aside, usually you are going “somewhere." You know where you are, and you know where you are going. This is what I think is missing for musicians. The realization that this is how it has to be with your career. You need to have an idea about your destination - where is your career going? Do you want to be a professional musician? Do you want your music to be your career? When do you want it to become your main source of income (if you do)? What do you want to accomplish? By when? And you need to realistically assess where your career is now because that is your starting point. If you don't know where you are, how will you know how to get where you are going?

Your career is like a cross country road trip, and just like driving across the country, your career will need to have a starting point, an end destination, and interim destinations (the first night we’ll stay at …). Your career needs the big dream goals, and the more immediate interim goals, and most of all you need a plan on how to achieve those goals. If you would like to get an idea of how to assess where you are, how to set some career goals to define where you are going, and make a career plan to get you there – stay tuned.

If you are interested in my definition of the difference between wishes, dreams and goals – feel free to read my blog post on the subject here http://businessdreams.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3778AE852DC720!140.entry