One of the little secrets about a musician’s life on the road is how boring it can be. It is not all the lights and music and applause we see on the stage, in fact, that only accounts for 2 hours of the 24 hours each day. The other 22 hours? Well…….that’s travelling and waiting around in buses, vans, planes, dressing rooms, hotels and airport terminals. As Charlie Watts once said about the Rolling Stones celebrating 25 years of being a band, “I worked 5 years and spent 20 years hanging around.” Well said Charlie!
I became a musician at age 38 after spending the previous 5 years as an entrepreneur building a business (and a living) from scratch. You entrepreneurs out there know that building a business is not a 9 to 5 venture. It is 10 to 16 hour commitment 6 to 7 days a week. Thus, my guilt as a musician having all this down time on the road was off the charts. I survived the boredom of traveling and waiting around for the next 22 years by writing.
I wrote a lot, then wrote some more. I wrote about how I came to be so fortunate to become a successful fulltime musician – my childhood dream. I wrote about the journey, the adventures and all the lessons I learned along the way. I was laying the foundation to become a public speaker in the back of the tour bus some 25 years ago.
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One of my favorite studies is a non-scientific collection of data from Australian palliative caregiver Bronnie Ware who wrote the book “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.” She documented that the most common regret of the dying looking back on their lives was this:
People wished they had the courage to live the life true to themselves and not the life others expected of them.
Let that sink in for a moment. Can you imagine a more tragic and terrifying realization in your final weeks and days on this planet than you essentially wasted your precious, precious life, all your years and decades because no one told you “Hey, you CAN live the life you want!” They were waiting for someone to give them permission and that someone never showed up. And in their final days they realized the only one who could give them that permission was themselves.
And they probably wondered “How come nobody taught me this? In school I was taught to read and write and multiply. I was taught the capitals of countries and the table of periodic elements and why the sun sets in the west and the function of my lungs and millions of other facts but they forgot to teach me this??????” I want my money back!!!
Having the courage to live a life true to yourself is not easy. It requires change.
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The only constant in life is change. Yet, we as a species fight it, we deny it, we run from it, we dread it, we try to bargain with it…….all to no avail. Think of the amount of energy, dysfunction and unfulfilled potential we lose fighting the inevitable.
But what would happen if we were taught from a young age to expect change and to view it as a necessary part of life? What if we were given the tools to not only embrace change but to create change, to seek out change? Can you imagine the potential that would release?
It the darkest days of my life, when I experienced epic change and failure – getting fired, going bankrupt, losing my house and my fiancé, and all hope and self-worth, I realized the only way forward, the only way to survive was to turn this change and failure into fuel, into motivation. Without that I would not be here today. Embracing change seems like a great investment to me.
Here are a few strategies for embracing change that work for me: