In my previous post I spoke on the importance of breaking down your big goals into smaller ones to help maintain ones focus and motivation throughout longer stretches of time. And the stretches of time until you achieve your goals will be long, because everything worth achieving takes time. Even an “overnight success” is often ten years in the making. Sometimes we’ll see someone shoot up out of nowhere into the top levels of fame, lets call them Justin Bieber or Rihanna, and we make get envious of their success, looking at their journey and how they got there, hoping to deduce some magic bullet and fixating ourselves on getting that same magic bullet so we can be just as successful, rather than working hard on the tried and true long-term approach of showing up for work every day and planning ahead.
An extreme focus on the big goals and the magic bullets only, often leads to an unhealthy desire to skip steps along the way. Skipping steps will feel very exciting in the moment, but almost always leads to less than ideal situations later on. Playing Letterman or something of the like is often an unrealistic goal set by acts before they’re ready. It usually comes with an expectation of instant stardom the next day that will not work out. Matter of fact, it can backfire completely unless you have diligently worked on your small and medium goals leading up to it. Playing Letterman should be a means, not an end. If you make it an end, then you might forget to focus on the most important part of getting an opportunity like that, which is what you do the day/week/month/year before and after to capitalize on the appearance, and what your eventual goal is. This could be to be a full time self-sufficient musician, to reach a million people with your music, or anything really.
A Letterman appearance alone won’t really do you much good. Hardly anyone will remember it the week after, unless you did something particularly shocking or incredible, and your sales probably won’t spike that much based on the performance alone. However, if the appearance is part of a larger scale plan, one made up of many small and medium sized goals, it can help lend credibility, galvanize your fan base, be a stepping stone to get that amazing booking agent you had been pursuing, and many other things. It should be a cog in the machine that gets you to your real goals. If you instead spend all your time on just getting that Letterman appearance above all else, and it’s too early in your career or you’re otherwise ill-prepared, then it will just look like you didn’t have your stuff together or you weren’t that good because nothing much happened afterward, and you’ll be relegated to the one-hit wonder has-been indie rock bin.
Think of it as building a house. If you don’t build a proper foundation, your hastily constructed mega mansion with the fancy fireplace will cave in sooner or later. And don’t put up the chandelier until you secure a roof.