Growing up, we all have ideas and thoughts of what we want to do “when we grow up.” Sometimes, this dreams come to fruition, sometimes they don’t. This is often due to a combination of factors, but as we get older it is more likely due to our thought processes and how willing we are to be flexible with the ideas that we have.
One of the biggest examples I have of this right now is the music scene. I’m not talking about a specific scene (ie, the punk scene, the rock scene, etc). I’m talking about the entire music scene, which for most of us (at least those of us older than our teens) almost doesn’t exist anymore. Older bands that have been around for decades (Queensryche, The B-52s) are still touring and drawing crowds, but the crowds are only a few hundred people, not the thousands that they used to pull in. Newer bands (Nothing More) are barely pulling in the same numbers, if they are lucky enough to build a following at all. Local bands are lucky to even find a place to play at all, much less a crowd to play too.
The commercialism of music is one of the biggest contributors to this. But there is another factor that is just as important, if not more so. For those of us that learned about music before the internet, music is more than just something played on the radio. It became a lifestyle. It was about the practice with your bandmates, social time, and the struggle to get recognized in your chosen field. It was about showing off your talent with instruments and gear. And part of it was about “my music is better than yours” (pop vs metal, country vs hip-hop, etc).
All of those things that we can control: practice, what we play, etc., those are all ideas in our heads. They are things that we learned to believe because of how the scene was when we were learning it. Most of us are having a hard time adapting to the way things are now. It doesn’t mean that we can’t adapt. But we have to shift our beliefs, we have to be willing to change our thought processes to succeed, instead of trying to hold onto something that no longer exists.
If we can learn to shift our thought processes, if we can learn to adapt what we have from the past, and change our venue from live performance to online presence, we can still have what we want. Maybe it will even be bigger that we expected. When we limit our ideas we are limiting ourselves. When we limit ourselves we are holding ourselves back. What if the adaptation to a new process is what we need to do to fulfill our purpose here on Earth, on this plane of knowledge and existence?
The Warriors Den 