I hope you’re enjoying your holidays!
I want to show you a picture of the studio where I recently recorded my Twelve Songs of Christmas album, and the reason may surprise you.
If you’ve never heard of a “vision board”, it’s a place where you collect pictures or images of your ideal life. Say, for example, you want to live in a large house on the ocean. You would put a picture of a large house on the ocean on your vision board, and have a constant reminder of your dream.
I have a vision board that has all kinds of pictures of my ideal home studio. It’s pretty grand.
My current reality, however, is quite different. Here is a picture of the studio where I recorded my recent album…
This is my dining room-turned-home office/studio. It’s not nearly as impressive-looking as the studios on my vision board.
What’s more, I live ten minutes from O’Hare airport, one of the busiest airports in the world. I constantly have airplanes flying over my home. I live one block from the railroad tracks. Those trains can be pretty noisy. I live on a major street that’s actually called a highway. Buses, motorcycles, trucks and loud cars make for a very noisy street.
I have to listen to the airplanes pass by and time my recording takes in between their intervals. If a car without a muffler decides to gun it while I’m recording, I have to do it over.
Perhaps you can see why it’s not on my vision board as my dream studio. You could say that, especially for recording relatively quiet acoustic instruments like a classical guitar, it is “less than ideal”.
But that didn’t stop me from recording and producing an album…that I wanted to give away. And, even though I was giving it away, I still gave it my all and did my best. I am very happy with the outcome – and many of you know what a perfectionist I can be when it comes to music.
The reason I am showing you this picture and telling you this story is to say that, sometimes we have to just do the best we can with the resources we have available to us. Our circumstances may seem less than ideal. That doesn’t need to determine our outcomes.
I heard motivational speaker Tony Robbins once say that what’s more important to our success than our resources is our resourcefulness.
My hope is that this will inspire you as you make plans for and dream about the new year. Instead of thinking about what’s possible based on the resources available to you, try to think about what’s possible based on the vision and faith within you.
Cheers!