Middle Age is the New Teenage

I think middle-age is a lot like being a teenager, you wind up back where you started, bored in suburbia, sitting on the couch thinking: “Is this it? Surely there’s more!”

When you are a teenager at home abiding by other people’s rules and when you are all grown-up with responsibilities, you have something to rebel against. When you’re in your ’20s (or just generally pre-mortgage / babies) you sort of don’t. Life is then as perfect as it gets. You have energy and health and get to please yourself a lot more than at any other point in life – so what’s there to rebel against? Sex with perfect bods and immunity from hangovers? Not!

Rock Begins At 40

(OK, 38, but close enough…)

People who kick-arse begin with a vision that is apparently ridiculous and then successfully engage a critical mass of people with that vision until their support helps it actually become reality.

U2 got a critical mass of people buying into their “impossible mission” – that a bunch of kids from working class Ireland could possibly become rock stars. This seems plausible to us in retrospect, but to your average person of limited vision this would have been laughable before they did it.

Here’s my crazy vision: To prove that dreams can come true – even for middle-aged musicians – thereby inspiring people to determinedly pursue their passions, no matter what their age or situation.

Think about it – middle-aged “popular music” musicians almost never rise from obscurity to establish a viable career as entertainers. All the working rock stars over 30 established their brands in their 20s. It’s an expectation waiting to be defied, and it has a massive “what’s in it for me” factor for loads of people – Hope (not to mention great music).

In 2012 I will have been gigging for 20 years – but I am really only just getting started and the best is yet to come.

To support my vision of geriatric glory you only need to do one thing – download some of my music for free. This will subscribe you to my mailing list so you can follow my further adventures in entropy, prescription drugs and rock n roll (you can unsubscribe later if you choose – although I may send round the heavies if you do).

Be Demanding

It was a lovely, noisy dinner party we had last night, and then after our guests had gone I went out to the office and wrote songs until about midnight.

So unsurprisingly, it was bloody hard to get out of bed this morning.

But that was ok because I am my own boss!

So I eventually rolled out of bed at about 8:45am and then took my own sweet time getting ready because I didn’t have to pretend that I was at my best. It wouldn’t work if I did this every day, my business would soon fail, but today it was so damn nice to be able to just sit at the table, glowering at my coffee and groaning until I was able to get out to office and get on with work, without worrying that “the boss” was going to give me a hard time.

It wasn’t easy to work at first either; I was too tired to be highly creative or effective. So I did some admin type stuff that you can do when your brain doesn’t work. This was actually a good thing because usually I avoid this stuff because I would rather do something inspired and creative. But, hey, I was being inspired and creative at 11pm last night writing songs and I can’t be “on” all the time.

So I got some administrative chores done, and did some work for some clients, stuff a robot monkey could have done, and then as the day wore on I felt better and things started to tick along nicely.

The other really good thing about being my own boss is that when I feel all antsy and need to go for a jog, I can do so at the drop of a hat, like I did today. There’s no bloody boss to beg permission to go do that or to drop the kid off at kindergarten or whatever.

The Trade Off

I’ve worked long and hard to get to a point where I do not have a boss and I’m sure as hell am not going back now. So this means that tonight after dinner and after the kid is in bed, I will be firing up the computer again and working on and into the night. That’s the trade off, you have to work hard but if you don’t manage it at 9am, well it doesn’t matter – just as long as the work gets done in the end.

Working from home as a marketing consultant is not my dream, by the way, but it’s a pretty comfortable way-station.

It allows me to plant seeds and nurture the real career – which is of course writing and music and cool stuff like that.

To make this happen, to get paid full time to make music and to write and generally do and make cool stuff, may take some luck, but I believe you make your own luck by rocking up to do the work and also by being demanding. By “being demanding” I mean just saying “I am going to do this. I am going to make that movie. I am going to work from home for myself.” Or whatever it is you want.

You demand it upfront. Surprisingly the universe is very responsive to demanding. If you think about it, the people who really get what they want in this world are actually very demanding. They say I am going to do this – so move, mountain, move!

That was what I did with working from home. I demanded of my old boss that she let me work from home and she just rolled over and said yes.

Then I wanted to work for myself instead of a boss, so I got on the phone and did cold-call after cold-call, for months, until I had clients.

I demanded clients and then I did the work.

That’s the trade off, it’s all very well demanding things of the universe, but you need to realise that in return the universe demands that you work your butt off.

If you don’t ask you don’t get.

But if you don’t work hard, you don’t get, even though you asked.

Glass and Blood and Leaves

An Interesting Life

New song flavoured with a genuine hangover, some minor stuff-ups and a hint of lawnmower in the background. The Scarab Bar is in Belgrave, Victoria but it could be any bar anywhere right?

If you like ze tune zen please download and/or use the share function to ping it around the world, around the world, around the world, around the world (repeat).