80: Navigating the Freelance Musician’s Hustle: Part 2
Remember the ‘Why’
Maintaining a clear vision of why you chose a music career, and continually fueling your passion for it, is crucial in sustaining your hustle. Visualizing the type of career you aspire to and identifying the engagements that fulfill you most can serve as your ‘north star’ - a guiding beacon. This will help you both choose the most meaningful work and will help connect your ultimate goals and motivations with the mundane non-musical work.
Every profession comes with its less inspiring, even tedious tasks. Take, for instance, the chore of meticulously tracking receipts and managing business expenses for tax purposes. Efficiently handling your taxes can save substantial amounts of money annually. These savings can free up resources, allowing you to embark on new projects, invest more in self-promotion, or reduce your teaching hours to focus more on practice. When you link each aspect of the hustle, even the hours dedicated to non-musical tasks, to your profound love for music, these tasks become more bearable and even meaningful.
Understanding your 'Why' is instrumental in navigating your career decisions. Not every opportunity will align with your goals, nor will every collaboration positively impact your career and well-being. Let your 'Why' direct you towards the types of work and musical partnerships that resonate with your aspirations and values. When you align your deepest passions with sustainable, paid career pursuits, you'll achieve the greatest levels of satisfaction and inspiration in your work. In contrast, those who stray from their core values risk burnout, bitterness, and may become miserable colleagues. Staying connected with your core reasons for pursuing music can prevent years of disappointment and frustration.
Set Goals and Write them Down
Goal setting is a simple and masterful tool for driving progress and achievement. Research suggests that individuals who write down their goals are 42% more likely to achieve them than those who don’t. Taking time to craft clear objectives with a specific timeline and measurable weekly progress can significantly improve your chances of achieving sustained and notable growth. Within the musician's hustle, identifying a few key goals can pinpoint areas where personal growth will be most impactful. Write down the final goal in detail. Then, outline the necessary steps, establish a timeline, and consider sharing it with a colleague for their input. Regularly reviewing your progress towards these goals, say weekly or biweekly, can help you stay on track.
Consider these simple, achievable, and relevant goals:
Develop a new website within three months
Grow Instagram followers by 500 in six months
Launch a quarterly newsletter
Secure funding for a new commission within five months using grant applications, personal donor appeals, and a crowdfunding campaign
Identify two worthy auditions to take in the next year and create a strong preparation plan
Form a new chamber ensemble and organize three inaugural concerts in six months
Acquire New Skills
Undergraduate music majors are exemplars of adaptability and grit - qualities that have highly valued applications well beyond the field of music. Their rigorous training instills a capacity to learn and master complex skills with discipline and resilience. With an abundance of intrinsic motivation, commitment, an aptitude for self-assessment and improvement, and a history of performing at elite levels, these musicians exemplify remarkable learning capabilities.
Every component of a musician’s hustle can be distilled into a set of learnable skills. Time management, budgeting, organization, content creation, social media strategies, tax preparation, website design, storytelling, financial planning, networking, and public speaking are all skills that can be developed. Similar to how one approaches mastering an instrument, significant progress can be made through regular learning and practice. This might involve reading a book, enrolling in an online course, watching educational YouTube videos, or seeking a mentor. Many successful CEOs and political leaders allocate daily time for learning, embracing the process of acquiring new skills over decades. Their careers have greatly benefited from their expanded skill sets and knowledge.
Structure
Establish efficient systems for managing your finances, taxes, travel plans, and social media presence and then allocate daily and weekly time to make regular progress towards career development. Determine which networking strategies resonate with you, and consistently devote time to these efforts. Plan and rehearse your comments from the stage well in advance, even practicing in front of friends for feedback. Getting in shape requires a dedicated exercise regimen tailored to specific goals. Similarly, the amount of time you invest in this regimen directly influences the results you achieve. This principle applies equally to the activities essential for sustaining a musician’s life. The more consistent time and effort you put into these tasks, the more sustainable and successful your career becomes.
Consider how much time you allocate each week to networking, social media engagement, and content creation. Just as you schedule regular practice, it’s important to carve out dedicated time for these business activities. If you can find four hours a day to practice, can you allocate three hours weekly for social media, three hours for maintaining professional relationships, and two hours for administrative tasks like organizing receipts and tracking finances? A well-structured schedule is key to fostering career growth.
Balance and Sustainability
The term 'hustle' is often associated with 'hustle culture,' a phenomenon where people increasingly work longer hours and pursue additional income streams beyond their primary jobs. While hard work is commendable, hustle culture is often criticized for its unhealthy emphasis on relentless work at the expense of life balance, self-care, and health. An unbalanced life can lead to illness, physical injuries, strained relationships, and unhappiness.
Establishing a sustainable and fulfilling career is an important overarching goal for musicians pursuing a life in music. This involves not only securing sufficient work to pay the bills and living a full life, but also ensuring longevity in one’s career. Achieving this requires a careful balance and a deep understanding of what supports your well-being or wellness.
The topic of musician wellness and the facets of a 'healthy' life are extensive and cannot be fully addressed in a blog post. However, it's important to acknowledge that a life out of balance and marked by unhealthy habits can lead to problems and potentially life-altering crises. Improving nutrition, sleep, exercise, close relationships, mental health, and physical well-being will move one towards optimal performance and will support career growth.
While the hustle is essential for generating and maintaining a viable workload, it only becomes a sustainable long-term strategy when balanced with health and well-being.
Perseverance
Years of disciplined practice instill in musicians the vital principle of perseverance - the profound understanding that consistent practice, methodical routine, and incremental improvement pave the way for remarkable achievements. The level of expertise and mastery required to be a professional classical musician is among the most demanding and sophisticated in any field. Those in this profession sometimes overlook the extraordinary achievement required to master a classical instrument at a high level. This success is a testament to the fundamental belief in the transformative power of gradual progress.
If you've chosen a life in music, you've acknowledged that a life devoted to art is deserving of immense sacrifice and commitment. Years of practice enabled your entry into a conservatory. Further years of effort have allowed you to earn money as a professional musician. You recognized this path as both noble and worthwhile.
The Musician’s Hustle, too, will develop slowly and persistently, with the same incremental determination. Acquiring new skills, setting goals, allocating weekly time for growth – all these steps lead to accomplishment. Embrace the challenging reality of being a working musician, foster a strong sense of ‘why’, and adopt a strategic, patient approach to your career. If dedicating countless hours in the practice room was worth it, then so is the effort to cultivate a meaningful professional journey. Achieving your goals, finding worthy collaborators, connecting with audiences who care, and earning a living from your art – all of these are within reach. There is no predetermined path; it is a journey where, cliché as it may sound, the journey itself is the destination.