4 Essential Lessons Music Taught Me About Business
When I was a teenager, I was a punk rock fanatic who played guitar… a lot of it. I was one of those kids who converted my parents garage into an amphitheater and annoyed the neighbors by covering every single Green Day song with my fellow bandmates.
Was I any good? I’d like to think so. I was grateful enough to have received private music lessons for years and worked my way up from playing simple open chords to learning sophisticated pentatonic scales to eventually writing my own music.
In many ways, spending most of my days skipping class and writing music laid the foundation for the way I look at business and how I run LawTrades today.
1. Passion Over Everything
If you ask my parents, they will tell you that they would ground me by taking away my guitar (instead of the PlayStation or Internet like most kids) because I loved it so much. There were times where I would lock myself in my room and play for 10 hours straight. And when I got my first Gibson Les Paul! I would literally wake up in the middle of the night to make sure it was still there.
Passion is a natural driving force for anything you care about. If you’re in a business that you’re completely immersed in—the nights get shorter and the work gets easier. Passion fuels persistence and gets you through the lowest days in your business by helping you push through.
I’ve been fortunate enough to do only things that deeply matter to me for much of my life. What am I trying to say? Find something that lights that fire inside of you and the money will follow.
2. Go Big Or Go Home
There were so many times where I had to play in front of an audience or compete with other musicians and my friends would say, “Yo Raad, you ready?”.
And even though I would always look over with a big grin and give a thumbs up, deep down I was fucking terrified. I feared dropping my pick midway, drawing a blank on the composition I spent weeks memorizing, or hitting a dead note that everyone notices.
But you know what? More often than not, everything worked out.
Similar to putting myself out there on a stage, business is about taking chances. The bigger the risk, the greater the return. what music taught me was not to play it safe—we’re all capable of learning and doing more. There will be days where you don’t quite hit the mark, but if you can quickly accept failure and move on, you might just nail it on the next one. And it’s that brief moment of success that helps you forget about all the mistakes and make everything totally worth it.
3. Try. Fail. Succeed. Repeat
Clinch the pick, analyze the notes in front of you, press down the fret, hit the strings and… ::something really bad that doesn’t sound like music::. You keep missing the note and perform this sequence of events multiple times. Being fed up, you decide to go for a walk, visualize in your mind exactly how it should play out, come back in, and execute it perfectly.
That’s how solid musicians do it and running a business is not so far off. Even today at LawTrades, I often step out of the office, go for a walk, and try to visualize how I want the situation to turn out. Whether it’s closing that big sale, getting positive reviews, making a customer happy or picturing the company being this huge thing 20 years from now. Even a decade later, I still practice the same principles.
4. Keep Pushing Forward
Nothing helped me improve my skills better than hanging out with older musicians who were more talented than me. I learned so many things that I never thought I could do, while receiving an overwhelming amount of encouragement to keep pushing forward. There were times where I would learn the simplest riff and it would be a reason for them to celebrate with me. That was truly the key to progression.
Always remember to celebrate the small accomplishments of your business whenever you can. Even if its just a tiny bit of progress, you should get stoked with your employees, family/friends, and mentors. Theres no greater feeling and no better way to learn life’s lessons. Music is my inspiration for business and I will always be grateful that I was introduced to it when I was younger.
What hobby, situation, or industry inspires your business today?
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