“Why is that you wanted a Ferrari when you were a kid but settled for a second hand Beetle?” 

Dec Cluskey (Lead singer of The Bachelors and founder of Makehits) 

Substitute the cars for Rockstar and shop assistant. No offence to shop assistants (I’ve done that in my time) but the point is - why do we stop dreaming at some point and settle for mediocre?

Simple answer for most is that reaching the dream is just too hard and we let the constant pressure to settle for “normal” take over. 

That’s no longer a viable excuse....

When pursuing my own dream of being a rock god guitarist I used to look at jobs as a means to an end. They paid for guitars, strings, rehearsals and demo recordings. I had no doubt in my mind that it was just a matter of time before I’d join the right band and be discovered.

So as soon as I got bored with a job I’d just quit, freewheel for a while and pick up another one when I needed cash again. 

That was a long time ago though - things were different. Jobs are hard to come by now - especially if you are a little older. 

But by the same token everything has changed. The Internet has done that. 

When I was treading the boards in various bands, things were done the hard way (the only way in those days) We didn’t have phones that could produce top quality videos of our performances.

We didn’t have Garage band to record our music on or Imovie to create and edit videos. We didn’t have Itunes to sell our music on or Facebook/Twitter/Instagram etc to promote ourselves on and grow our audience. 

We paid to have demo’s made and later to have those tapes transferred to CDs. We paid for videos or got video students to come and film us. To this day there is no record of the hundreds of shows we played (except for some fuzzy old photo prints, some poor quality phone pictures and a few VHS tapes) 

You built up a following a few people at a time by slogging around the country paying wherever you could get a gig. 

Before we moved home recently we transferred a lot of old tape recordings onto a laptop just to get them into the digital domain where we might be able to do something with them.

This isn’t sour grapes by  the way - we loved doing everything I’ve described - there was no choice anyway. But Man! how much easier it must be now!!

Can’t say I loved many of the jobs I did to pay for the dream but again there was no practical alternative.

Setting up a traditional business was too expensive and would have taken too much time anyway.

Not now though.

With what I know now I could have run an online business to both fund and promote the musical dream. I have a guitar affiliate website as a matter of fact. 

Most record companies are now online as most music is downloaded these days. 

So if you have dream there has never been an easier time to pursue it.

If your dream is to run a business aligned with an passion or interest you can do it without selling the house or going into massive debt.

If your dream is just to be able to generate money in a way that gives you more free time - you can do it.  

We don’t have to let life tire the life out of our dreams on a 9-5 hamster wheel - we have options. 

                           GET THE SKILLS - BUILDYOURTOPIA

Cheers