Music Success in Nine Weeks – Week 1

I’m Rob Lawrence. At around the age of three or four I enjoyed making melodies on the family piano. I had no idea how it operated or what melodies were, I just knew that the affect it had on me was music to my ears.

Perhaps not to the ears of others.

Despite being of talking age then, I have since learned that through the motion of music, I can express myself in ways I have yet to achieve creatively through other means.

I was fascinated by records, still am. I would spend every spare hour as a young Robert studying the clockwise spin of a vinyl record, mesmerised by the thirty three and one-third revolutions per minute on my Dad’s hand-made belt-driven record player.

Dad’s oversized closed-back headphones never restrained me from listening to the intricate tribal rhythms of the two drummers, Merrick and Terry Lee, on ‘Kings of the Wild Frontier’. I would listen with great intensity to how Marco Pironni created a sound-scape from only a six-string electric guitar and would marvel at the Ants mystery and mastery within the wax.

Thirty years later I’m downloading a PDF called ‘Music Success in Nine Weeks’ and I am fascinated as to why.

I love music. What is success? And why would I want it in 63 days?

Goal setting

On opening the book, ‘Music Success in Nine Weeks‘ I find that the first week is all about goal setting. The books author, Ariel, encourages us to get out our journals. My passion to write (usually non-sense) has grown ever since reading Julia Cameron’s ‘The Artist’s Way’ back in 2008 when I found the power of a tool called ‘The Morning Pages’.

During our first week on this nine week musical success journey we are asked to write down our recent successes and to get clear on our goals. Ariel jumps us in to thinking about our immediate and long-term objectives:

• What do they include and exclude?
• What do they look like?
• What do they involve?
• How big will they be?
• When do we want them to materialise?

The exercises encourage us to create works around our written goals, to decorate our intentions using colourful pens and framework. I found myself drawing records, musicians, guitars, amps, instruments, notes, landscapes and abstract shapes. My goals involve specifics around online marketing, film and TV instrumental work, buying a new instrument and repairing another. I realised I want to record a solo album. We’re asked to set 6 goals in this field, so stretching myself, I set myself seven.

Re-writing a number of goals enabled me to get more specific, more clear, more measurable and further energised. Some goals I wasn’t as fired up about as I was others: An early warning signal to either re-write again, scrap or replace perhaps.

If you’ve done a lot of goal setting stuff before, Ariel’s approach at first seems simple. The great thing about never doing enough of these exercises is that they further increase clarity. Clarity introduces power. Energy. Action.

Thinking big

The most powerful part of these exercises was focusing on the Music ‘career’ lifetime goals.

The lifetime goals exercise inspired Sandra and me to create a new vision board.

Considering that only 3% ever succeed in formulating written goals, as Ariel highlights and research proves, you are ten times more likely to achieve your goals if you write them down and regularly review them.

“In the absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.” – Robert Heinlein, Novelist

Ariel informs us that it helps to have our new goals in regular view. I consider that, like great-looking women, they are much prettier and more inspirational when in full view.

To my adult-self this focus feels good. Both empowering and freely aspiring to the soul to think and dream out loud. Too often we are shut down by our own thinking, being trapped in what others may be thinking of us. As an adult it can be hard to be taken seriously as a ‘Musician’ (despite it being one of many hats) as it is regularly seen as something only a child aspires to, isn’t it?

Given the reactions I sometimes get I might as well say I am aspiring to be an astronaut.

I will always be an aspiring musician, it’s just what I am.

I found I had to employ methods of non-distraction as to avoid the demon beliefs of the ‘hows’ and the ‘how nots’.

I think big, colourful, bright and bold.

Having set some personal goals I found an hour (I didn’t think I had) had passed. Having witnessed my pen spill ink and the crayons create colourful chaos, I realise that I must have been having a mild experience of something athletes call ‘the zone’ – that point of presence when you are just ‘being’. Joy.

I get that when songwriting. I get that when watching records spin.

It kind of reminded me of being three again.

Related links:

• My Goals
  
• Music Success in Nine Weeks
• Ariel’s book “Music Success in Nine Weeks”
• Week 2

Photo credit: Someone in my family