So …. I guess I am stuck on the ‘Long and Winding Road’ theme because of where I’m at in my own career. It’s all very Saturnian – hard work, endurance, building, learning, tearing down the old, working on the new and MOST OF ALL, staying enthused. But I’m keeping hanging on – hoping I’m not clinging to a cloud!

[book excerpt]
HANG ON TO YOUR LOVE

“People talk about following your bliss,” says Simon Robinson. “But sometimes when you do that and you have to ‘play the game’ – pandering to shop buyers who don’t want to buy anything that hasn’t already been in a magazine – you end up hating the thing you once loved. It becomes such brutal, grinding work that you don’t want to think about it anymore.” I know what he means. I got to a stage in my music where I was so focused on turning it into something that would make me a decent living that I forgot why I was doing it in the first place — for love; for its own sake; because I just loved doing it in the moment.

“There should always be a sense of moving ahead and growing all the time,” says Michael Becker, former musician and producer turned photographer. “But you absolutely positively can’t be focused on the end result.” Interestingly, since Michael started focusing on photography and, consequently relaxed about his music, his music career has been quietly taking off again – most notably with the song ‘In the Deep’, which he co-wrote and produced (and played all the instruments on) with actress-singer Bird York, which plays out the Oscar-winning movie Crash.

But photography is now his first love and he has faith in it turning out well – to the extent that he was willing to mortgage his house at the beginning. “I’m not sure I knew where I was going but I knew I was going somewhere,” he says. And having researched his chosen career thoroughly , he was prepared for it to take a long time. “It was something I read over and over again on the websites I looked at. It takes time.”
[end of book excerpt]

So here are my tips to keeping it fresh along the way:

1. Be flexible. You really don’t know what you might be doing in ten years. Be willing to go in a totally new direction. Michael Becker, for example, is flourishing as BOTH a musician AND a photographer nowadays.

2. Keep going. Duh! Just keep putting one foot in front of the other. You will get somewhere. Even if it’s somewhere you didn’t expect to get.

3. Having said that, it is probably good to have in mind a destination. Personally I love walking, but I have to be going somewhere, preferably to do something like shop or visit a friend or whatever. The thought of aimless walking with no destination doesn’t inspire me to even put my shoes on!

4. Which isn’t to say that you can’t make detours. Detours are good. Follow your bliss, as they say.

5. Keep learning. I am now studying theory and piano and I can’t wait for my next lesson!

6. Do the “artist date” that Julia Cameron talks about in her fab book, The Artist’s Way. I went to a Giacometti retrospective at MOMA a few years ago and I couldn’t wait to get back home and start composing. Perhaps if I’d been a sculptor I might have come home and thrown away my tools! Then again, Mikhail Barysnikov said, “No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business.” But it didn’t stop him, did it! Be inspired by it all!

7. Banish all thoughts of “overnight success”. In fact, if you look deeper into all the overnight successes you will find that they were preceded by years of hard work. In fact, banish all thoughts of “success” and focus on doing whatever you’re doing because you love it. As Gene Hackman, one of my heroes, once said: “I was trained to be an actor, not a star!”

8. Don’t fret about your self doubts. If you didn’t have self doubt, where would be the inspiration to keep improving? Or so my very wise friend, singer Mansur Scott always says to me.

9. Treat failures and setbacks as lessons and soldier on. As novelist Veronica Henry says: “Some days I am all over the place, convinced that I have the hardest job in the world …. and how on earth can I be expected to dredge up inspiration from nowhere. After a few days of wallowing I have to give myself a stern talking to and tell myself to get on with it in a professional and objective manner!”

10. Be willing to throw out everything you have done up to now and start afresh. As Veronica says: “Sometimes you have to do the worst thing and throw everything out. That is seriously hard but entirely necessary. And after the initial pain, a huge relief, as you no longer have to do battle with something that’s not working. That’s when you can move on. In the meantime … the blackness. And the euphoria. Thank God for the euphoria.”