MySpace - you gotta love MySpace. I've placed a page there (http://www.myspace.com/royvogt ) a few months ago and have been collecting Friends. Some of them are Famous, some are not, and some are old friends I've not talked to in awhile.

One of them is Steve Grossman, a wonderful drummer who has played in The Gibson-Miller Band and done sessions for India Arie on a Grammy-winning CD. He has a great site called www.whyifailed.com that is outlining applying business concepts to the Music Business. I encourage you all to check out his website and really look at his ideas of goal-setting, networking, multiple streams of income, and other concepts including some I've touched on in my columns.

Reading some of Steve's articles brought back memories of books I've used along the way to help me stay focused on developing my career. You can find these on the myriad of book sites on the Internet or your local library. They've all helped me out in developing short and long-term goals. Like diet and exercise books, they give great advice that is really difficult to follow sometimes. However, if you do, you will be rewarded with more success than if you had just wandered around trying to get gigs and randomly practicing and jamming with your buddies.

The granddaddy of them all for me is Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. I learned about that book from session drummer and arranger Terry Waddell. It changed me from whining about why I didn't get the big breaks or sessions into doing so. It teaches you how to set goals and reach them and has been around since the Depression. I credit it whenever I write out goals and give a few minutes each morning focusing on them. The funny thing is that anytime I slow down enough to do that I look back a year later and I realize I've met my goals.

Along the same lines and little over a decade later I came across Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and it had a similar effect. At the time I'd had a couple of hard Professional and Personal knocks and it helped me catch my breath and reset my priorities. It helped me to move from being Reactive about what had happened to me to being Proactive and achieving results by setting goals and working toward them.

After I had achieved my goals and gotten the Big Time Touring Gig with the Big Time Paycheck I had no idea of what to do with all of that money. Enter Dave Ramsey and his book Financial Peace. I learned why and how savings worked and that even bassists could save money and "musician" and "broke" didn't have to be mutually inclusive terms. Dave has written several books since then and I highly recommend all of them.

It's been said that successful businessmen and entrepreneurs read at least 1 nonfiction book a month in their field. I would remind myself and all of us that we're not only musicians but that if we want to be paid for our efforts we are in business. I've added 1 non-music book a month to my reading (the last one was Chicken Soup for the Body and Soul which contains a story by Eden's own Lane Baldwin among others).

Along with working on our musical skills we have to work on our people skills and our business skills. Try this strategy for a while and see where it leads in the New Year.

Peace and Low Notes,
Roy C. Vogt
Nashville Bassist
Bass Instructor, Belmont University, Nashville, TN

PS - If you found a Bass Mentor last January and studied the last year, take a minute to dig out that old recording from January 2006 and listen. You've improved significantly, I bet. - RV

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