What entrepreneurs can learn from my terrible cover band

Beatles tribute band

As a teenager I was in a cover band. Which is bit like selling imitation goods at the market for discount prices. We practiced a couple of times a week, for about a year. Sure we improved, but never thought we were good enough to start doing gigs. We never left the garage. What a waste.

Maybe we were good enough, maybe we weren’t. Whatever we thought didn’t matter because there was no feedback from the market, only voices in our heads and group think. (pun intended).

But worse that that, is this. We would much rather have played our own songs, but didn’t believe we had the talent. We didn’t even allow ourselves the privilege of doing what we believed in. We ended up hidden away playing ‘songs we liked’ and never sounded as good as the originals. Which no one ever can. Our fear from ourselves killed our dream before we even started. Our net results was worse than if we tried to do originals and failed.

When starting anything, here’s a few things to remember:

  • We’ll never be ready.
  • Copies get compared to who came first, and always make less money.
  • It’s harder to compare, when you make original stuff.

Get out of the garage and be original. It is better to fail being you, than fail by not quite being them.

You should totally read my book – The Great Fragmentation.