Defining Musical Success

by Minim Pro @ 2010-04-01
Making a success of your musical life has been a recurrent theme on this blog recently and whilst I've talked about the importance of the right mindset, targeting the right audience, making decisions, joining the conversation and a whole host of other things that will help you to do that, I haven't really touched on what success means.

We all want to be successful, but the question of how success is defined is important. For one person, success may mean nothing less than world domination and becoming the most respected, biggest selling jazz musician of all time; for another, it might simply be to be able to play some tunes with other people at a local jam without making a hash of it.

Deciding exactly how you define musical success is important for two reasons. Firstly, if you don't know what success is, how will you know if you achieve it? Secondly, defining success will help you determine the shape you want your musical career to take and allow you to plan accordingly. Determining how successful you're going to be can seem counter-intuitive at first - after all nobody believes that they wouldn't want to be as successful as they possible can. Ask any jazz student if they'd like to be a world-famous musician and the answer is almost invariably yes. However, when you examine the reality of what 'success' involves, it may not be as attractive an option.

If you asked the same person 'Would you like to spend over 300 nights a year on the road, living out of a suitcase, trying to maintain a long-distance relationship with your partner and not being involved on a daily basis as your kids grow up?', then the answers might be a little different. When deciding on the kind of music career you want, it's important to look at all the things that are important in your life and make sure that the career you are designing is compatible with all the other things that matter to you.

(N.B. As usual on this blog, I'm using the term career to encompass a person's musical life and activities rather than what they do for a living. It's perfectly possible for someone to earn their income in another way and a have a jazz career in this context.) Whatever role music plays in your life, determining the path you would like your career to take is all about balance. However, it's important that you decide what form that career should take rather than leaving it to outside factors like chance or to other people like promoters, record companies and the media.

The definition of a successful career will be different for each person, but it's important to spend a little time thinking about exactly how much time and effort you are really prepared to devote to your music and how dominant a role you are prepared to let it take in your life before starting to plan for the future. This can even come down to simple questions such as 'how many gigs a week do you want to play?'. If you're gainfully employed outside of your music then think realistically about how many nights you're prepared to spend on the bandstand. How many times a week will you be able to get in late and get up early?

If you have a partner, and especially if you have kids, think about how much of your personal time you're willing to devote to being out playing and away from your family and what kind of impact your musical career is going to have on them. These kinds of questions are ones that people don't think about very often and it wouldn't surprise me if I sounded like I was trying to talk people out of pursuing their interest in music. However, nothing could be farther from the truth, all I'm advocating is spending some time figuring out exactly what kind of music career is going to give you the most satisfaction in the context of your life as a whole.

In the modern era of self-help and motivational media, we are encouraged to Find Our Passion, to Think Big, to Reach for the Stars, to set Big Hairy Audacious Goals, to decide to Have It All.

What most of this material neglects to mention is that not all of us have ONE thing that is an all consuming, obsessive passion. There are some people out there that do, and they are the ones that will invariably reach the top as a result - whether that's in music, sport, business or anything else. However, most of us have more than one thing going on in our lives. Charlie Parker famously spent years practising 14 hours a day. This means that he didn't do anything else from, say, 10am until midnight. Every. Single. Day. For years.

Are you prepared to sacrifice everything else in your life to music and put in those kind of hours? If not then having a goal of being the most celebrated sax player of all time is probably not a sensible one to adopt. Nothing in this post is meant to rain on anyone's parade - in fact I hope people will find it liberating because I'm arguing that we can think as big or small as we wish when designing our musical lives. None of us should feel that it's not worth trying to take control of our careers and becoming masters of our own musical destiny unless we're professional musicians shooting for fame, fortune and artistic immortality.

Furthermore, none of us should feel pressured by society or the media or anyone to judge ourselves as musical successes or failures by criteria that other people have set or set goals that we believe we 'should' be aiming for. Music has a different role to play in each of our lives and whether that's as an all-consuming passion, a serious hobby or merely an enjoyable diversion, only the individual can truly know. Deciding exactly what a successful musical career will involve for us is the first step in making it happen.

Taking control and writing our own definition of musical success allows us to set positive and helpful goals that are as inspiring and exciting as they are achievable and likely to make us happy.
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