Today marks a big day for me. Today, I go back to being the confident person I was not too long ago. What about you? Is this going to be a new day for you? Are you going to take the bull by the horns and do what needs to be done in order to achieve your goals?
Let me tell you a little story about myself and how I went from rags to riches to rags just like that.
Back in the year 2000, I was working for a software development company as a QA tech and programmer. Yeah, double duty there.
Anyway, that was the last year of working there. I lost my job for a variety of reasons that I won’t get into here. Let’s just say the economy was the main culprit.
At my age at the time (42) I didn’t think it was going to be so easy for me to find another job and it wasn’t. Finally, after 3 years of working dead end jobs, I gave up looking and turned to the Internet. That was in 2003.
It took me a few years, but by 2006 I was making really good money online selling information products. Now during this time I was still working at my music but more as a hobby than seriously. I never really intended to end up doing what I’m doing now.
Anyway, by 2009 things were really going very well. I was making more money than I had ever dreamed of making. In short, I was on the top of the world.
Then we had the economic collapse and some Internet changes and things started to slowly go downhill. It didn’t happen all at once, but I noticed that my income was decreasing quite a bit each year. I’d say it was a good 30% decrease each year.
Finally, the bottom fell out completely (this year) and my business collapsed altogether.
However, I saw the writing on the wall last year and starting in July decided to make music my main focus. So I started to make plans for my royalty free music site which went live this January.
But it didn’t end there.
I realized that I couldn’t count on this as my only source of income so I started mapping out other strategies that were also music related. Right now I’d say I have at least a half dozen projects in the works. I only need one of them to catch fire.
Now, I could have wallowed in self pity and hated the world for my bad breaks. And I guess for a time I was pretty upset. But I realized that this was unproductive energy. I couldn’t change what was. All I could do was move forward.
Today, I made a checklist of all the things I need to do today, this article being just one of the many items. After I am finished with it, I will move onto the next item on my list. I fully intend to work a 14 hour day today (7 AM to 9 PM) if I can.
I will continue to do this until I am back on top of the mountain.
This will be the first day of the rest of my life. It will be the first day of my getting back to the life I used to have.
What about you? Is this going to be the first day of the rest of YOUR life?
If it is, before you begin, there are a few things I want to leave you with because there are pitfalls along the way.
One of those pitfalls is not having a plan. You can’t just get up and start doing things. You need to have some direction. What is it that you want to achieve? Whatever it is, you only work on things that bring you closer to achieving it. That means no wasting time on Facebook or Twitter or wherever you go to kill time. That’s not going to bring you closer to your goal. It will only kill yet another day of your life. You can’t get those days back.
I have found that making a schedule and actually sticking to it is a wonderful thing. This takes a lot of discipline. It’s so easy to look at an item on your schedule and say to yourself “I don’t want to do this. This is boring.” Or it’s too hard or it takes too long or whatever the excuse is. If you have something that needs to be done, you need to do it…period. Find a way to make it happen.
You want to ideally create that schedule so that the most important things get done first or the things that take the least amount of time get done first. This frees up the rest of the day to do the more time consuming things.
Another pitfall is doing things that you could hire somebody else to do. For example, I am working on a project that required me to write a sales letter. Now, I could have written that sales letter myself but I realized that my time was better spent working on my music. So I hired a copywriter to write my sales letter for me. I’m sure she did a better job on it than I would have done.
Don’t waste time on activities that aren’t your strong suit. Get an expert to do it. Otherwise, you end up with a substandard product. And you certainly don’t want that.
I’ve seen both the top and the bottom of the mountain. Looking down it looks great. But it can also be a little scary. What if you fall? You can kill yourself. Conversely, looking up from the bottom, it looks like you’ll never make it to the top. But you can, one step at a time. Unless you’re Superman, nobody makes one giant leap and gets from the bottom to the top overnight. It takes time. It may not be as easy to climb to the top as it is to fall from it, but it can be done. I did it once. I can do it again.
So can you.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim