As a small business owner at the beginning of your career, which is what every up-and-coming musician essentially is, it’s very exciting to think of the grand visions only. Ah to play stadiums, to put that gold album on the wall of your big house, to sign all your friends and make them famous, to be on Letterman, to cover your favorite magazine.
Big goals can be very motivating, but at the same time, because they’re intimidating, equally demotivating, which often leads to inertia. The amount of work necessary to get there will certainly look overwhelming from the ground level, and that’s if you even already know what to do to get there. Setting mid level goals that are more attainable can be helpful, like opening for a bigger acts that one day might plays those stadiums, or putting out a split EP with one of your talented friends, or looking into local TV programs that have live music performances. After banging your head against the wall for a while, even those can give one that “well, screw this, I give up,” kind of feeling. That’s why it’s important to break down your goals to the smallest steps possible. The StartUp Daily just posted a great post on this, where they advocate setting your eyes on improving your business by just one percent each week. Those tiny baby steps actually add up, and will lead to your business growing by 50% in one year.
At Family Records we’ve just started a system to apply this model of making things happen. We call it the MITs of the Week, or Most Important Things. Every Monday we brainstorm in the office and come up with 2 to 3 small goals for the week for each artist. They need to be small enough to be able to achieve in a week’s time, and they must connect to medium-sized goals for the month, and bigger ones for the year. No matter what, we commit to focusing on getting those MITs out of the way in that week, and they will subsequently lead us closer to our medium-sized goals. For example, if a medium sized goal is to land a good opening slot in the fall for our artist Casey Shea, then related MITs for any given week might be setting up a newly updated EPK page to send to booking agents, making a list of upcoming tours that would be appropriate, and finding contact information for the artist’s in question. Once you break it down to tiny baby steps, it’s much easier to be motivated throughout the process, as you achieve little goal after little goal and see yourself getting closer to the bigger ones.
In my next post I will further explore the dangers of skipping the little steps and focusing on the big ones only.
(Note that WordPress had an allergic reaction to something, so the blog is looking a little off right now, no like button for example, but dear friend Jeff the Wizard of Webs is taking a look tonight and will hopefully get it back to normal)
Picture artfully suggested by James.