What being a musician taught me about business and life.

WARNING - this post contains a little bit of bad language

Although it says so on my profile I expect that most of you will not have read-back to the point where you see what I did at college. When I was a kid I knew exactly what I wanted to be…a concert violinist. I was good. Very good. I worked hard and had a passion for music and particularly the violin. I auditioned to go to music college and was accepted to go to Trinity College of Music (now Trinity Laban) one of the world’s finest conservatoires.

Lesson Number 1

At the point where I went, I was “hot shit.” In fact I was one of the best violinists I knew. There were few pieces of music that were being my capacity, so I had a swagger and confidence about me. However, when I arrived in the rarified world of music college it turned out that I was not in fact “hot shit”…I was just…erm…“shit”! Well actually that’s a joke, but I wasn’t the best there, in fact I was much closer to being the worst than the best. Anyway, as it happened, I sustained an injury which meant my “career” as a violinist was cut short so perhaps the good news is that I left before I was kicked-out. My point being that no matter how good you may think you are there is always someone better and when you get to the top of one ladder you are at the bottom of another. That’s just life.

Lesson Number 2

Despite my disappointment at the realisation that I was not in fact the next Yehudi Menuhin, the process of studying the violin taught me a lot about the importance of practising long and hard. The of you who have looked me up on Instagram or YouTube will see that these days I play the acoustic guitar as a hobby. I am fortunate enough to have Martin Simpson (one of the world’s best steel strung folk & blues guitarists) as my teacher and he once said to me “you need to practice every part of a performance - even the performance.” This is so true. There is no substitute for pacing around your lounge videoing yourself delivering that important talk you need to give. Steve jobs once said he spends 90 hours preparing each keynote - 30 hours writing it, 30 hours putting the slides together and 30 hours rehearsing. You owe it to yourself and what’s more you owe it to your audience. If there are 500 people in the audience and you speak for 30 minuets that’s 250 man-hours of their time you are taking up. To have not prepared is criminal and you deserve to be booed off the stage if you aren’t brilliant. “Winging it” is the ultimate insult to the people watching you.

Lesson Number 3

There is NOTHING more nerve wracking than standing up to perform in front of an audience - playing the violin, playing the guitar, speaking, pitching…whatever it is. I know people who do it for a living that are on occasion physically sick before stepping on stage. It’s okay. But remember this when you are on stage you think the audience will stone you if you make a mistake, they won’t. You know this is true because when you are in the audience you don’t want to see the person on stage suffer or make a mistake, you want to see them have a great time and do a good job of entertaining you. So when you are on stage, be nervous, sure, but enjoy the experience too this is what life is all about.

Lesson Number 4

When I was a violinist I played (to pick a piece at random) Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, literally HUNDREDS of times. Was the piece devalued in the audience’s eyes because they were not the first people hearing it? No, of course not. In fact many of the members of the audience will have heard the piece many times before and enjoyed every one of those times. So don’t assume that the talk you are delivering can only be used once because it probably (if you write it well and polish it well) can be delivered many times to a rapped audience.

Lesson Number 5

Live for the now! Every time I played a piece I used to “get into it” and give it my all. Some pieces I liked more than others, that’s true, but all of them I liked more the better I got at playing them. You too can get pleasure from getting better at what you do. Set yourself goals - how well you can speak, how often you tweet/blog/post, how quickly you respond to customers and always try to improve. There can be pleasure in everything and refining what you do can be surprisingly good.

Lesson Number 6 (the last one)

Critics are sometimes right. Irrespective of what you might think about your performance, your offer, your delivery, your product if the market/audience doesn’t like it…it might just be because its shit! Get over it and move on. Please.

What we do is the ultimate extrapolation of that. If I post something online and it dies on its feet it probably was misjudged or not very good. As the old saying goes - a pig with lipstick on is still a pig. Fail fast and move on. It’s okay just because I really hate your article doesn’t mean I hate you.

If you would like to see how you can be more robust and better in the social media space…get in touch.

P.S. If you wanted to see me play the guitar (and I don’t blame you if you didn’t) there are some snippets on Instagram and YouTube - both wit the username @theadamgray