Get passionate about finding where you are going wrong

The twenty something year old me was very scared of some one spotting me doing something wrong. But I guess that is normal for most of us at that age… The thing is, now I understand the importance of finding out where I am gong wrong. And here’s a funny thing, I actually know where my thinking changed. It goes back about eighteen years by now, when I decided to teach my self (with a little help from my aunt, yep I have a cool aunt) HTML, so that I could make my own websites rather than pay someone a crazy amount of money for it. And let’s make this clear here, I don’t have problem paying someone for a great work they do, but I just simply didn’t have the money.

HTML is the very basic code to build a website. Now days, most of us don’t need to go that deep thanks to content management systems like WordPress, which I am a big fan of. But still today, knowing HTML is a massive advantage, and I use bits of it almost daily. But in the beginning parts of using the code, I was making mistakes. And finding these mistakes in a massive amount of code became important. And when I did, I got a great amount of pleasure from fixing my own mistakes and seeing the final result working.

Now I have expanded this way of thinking into most aspects of my work. First of all, no matter how good you are at something, you still make mistakes, we all do. And getting better involves us finding these mistakes and fixing them. Now if someone point out a mistake (in a constructive way)I am making, they are helping me to do my job better.

Second point is researching. I the music business you do end up doing a lot of research (how to do this, how to do that, how to get a festival gig, where to print CD’s T-Shirts, how to tour on a budget, how to make your own website…) and getting good at doing this research can make or break your career. The mistake I made in the past is trying to find the information you want to find. We let our heart to do the research, not our rational thinking. Let me give you an example. So you want to be successful in the music business, the first thing many musicians Google (I know most of you have done this) is how to get a record deal. Now if I tell you that you would be much better off going the independent route as far as you can, you might not listen to me, because you don’t want to hear this. You don’t want me to be right, you want to get signed to that silly record deal, which guarantees you nothing…

Finding out this should be a great moment for you, I know it was for me 🙂 I found out where I was going wrong, and I changed my route. And this was one of those crucial turning points where I went from trying to do something, in to actually doing something.

So get passionate about finding where you are going wrong. Every mistake is one more to tick off from the list and one step closer to the success. And celebrate when you do find some of your mistakes, that will help you mentally see the mistakes as an opportunities to learn.

J.P.

The author J.P. Kallio is a singer songwriter
To get EIGHT of his songs for free go HERE