Balance

I'm one month into my year-long plan now, so I thought now would be a great time to spend a post talking about specifics of my goals and hopes and how this blog is supposed to help me get there. The word "balanced" is everywhere, but when I say that I want to be “balanced,” what do I mean? I want to have all the various aspects of my life in a positive state of operation.

Financially, I want to be in a place where reasonable, unexpected fiscal hiccups don't cause panic - If I have a week that I don't work a full 40 hours, I'm not in trouble. I don't want to be living paycheck to paycheck. I'm fine with not being rich or being able to drop money on whatever I want, but I would like to buy groceries without having to worry about the cost. Specifically, I plan on setting up an emergency fund and then paying off my credit card debt.

Musically, I intend to be fully-employable as a musician. This statement mostly applies to my own quality of playing. I know that I'm easily capable of winning a job, but I also realize that I'm not there yet. As I mentioned before as well, I hope to be making 25% of my total income from music, preferably playing and teaching.

Those two topics are the biggest and most pressing areas of my life. Now, how am I going to go about achieving reaching these goals? Most of the details of my personal financial stuff won't be discussed in terms of dollar amounts, but I will be discussing what my goals are and where I am in regards to meeting those goals. For the musical goals, I'll be doing posts similar to those I've already done: discussing practice methods and method books, spotlights on players and composers, etc.

Some other goals of mine:

Increasing the amount of at-home or from-scratch cooking I do.

Exercise, at least a little bit!

Do some music-related scholarly writing.

 

I'm really trying to get this blog filled out and "balanced" in it's own way. Slowly but surely!