You're about to learn the five critical elements that have fueled the success of the careers of all great musicians can you buy sound cloud plays. Until he possesses these key elements for himself, it will be almost impossible for him to achieve his musical dreams and build a successful career in the music business.

Read below to discover these five key elements and take action on the information you learn:

Music Career Success Key #1: Don't Set Realistic Goals

All of the best-known and most successful musicians failed to achieve their goals by realistically thinking about what seemed possible. Instead, they focused their minds like a laser ONLY on what they really wanted. When you make your goals in line with the things you want most, you will be much more motivated to achieve them. More on that in a moment…

Think about this: of the following options, which would inspire you to put all your time and energy into growing a music career?:

Make a demo recording with a band and possibly play some shows around town.

Writing chart-topping songs for an amazing band and then promoting your music on a massive world tour: playing to stadiums full of fans, making tons of money from music sales alone, and never working a regular job again.

Even if your goals in the music business have nothing to do with releasing music, the point remains valid: Don't allow yourself to accept anything less than what you really want in your music career, just to be realistic. Life is too precious to live without doing the things you really want. When you set goals that don't inspire you, you will almost certainly NEVER achieve the things you really want in music.

All the biggest rock stars are people like you. They started out small, whether they were broke with no idea how they would make it in music, lacking musical talent, or not having a band to play with… Imagine where they would be now, if they had told themselves that. Their dreams of a musical career were unrealistic or didn't seem possible. Well, of course not…they followed their dreams and achieved them!

You must do what they did. Start building your music career by focusing on what you WANT, not what seems possible.

Music Career Success Key #2: Manifest Your Musical Dreams Into Reality Before They Actually Come True

Musicians who never achieve anything significant in this industry build paths to their goals starting from where they are in the present moment.

On the other hand, musicians who achieve great success do something completely different. They plan their music career starting from the end point of achieving their goals and work backwards to the present day. They imagine themselves having already achieved their primary goals, and then build their lives around this vision. This is a much more effective way to accurately determine the actions required to build your music career.

Key to success in a musical career #3 – Start living or start dying

The two keys I mentioned above are essential to building a successful music career. With this in mind, you need more than just goals and a plan of action to realize your musical dreams. You have to take action every day to get closer to your goals. You may think this is common knowledge, but you'd be surprised how many musicians abandon their musical dreams simply due to lack of effort (in terms of physical action).

Visualize this scenario (I use it as inspiration for the professional musicians I mentor): You just learned about an illness you contracted that requires major surgery. If you do not have this surgery, you are guaranteed to die in no more than half a year. To make matters worse, the surgery is extremely expensive and cannot be covered by your insurance company (nor can you borrow money to pay for it). So you have to make a decision: you can allow yourself to die, OR you can take whatever action is necessary to get the money needed for surgery.

This example is certainly extreme, but it's a perfect illustration of the type of mindset you need to have to build a successful music career. Making big moves (taking action) in your music career is completely different than sitting around waiting for things to happen to you (allowing yourself to 'die').

With this in mind, hard work/consistent action does not necessarily equate to success in your music career when you don't know exactly what you need to do to achieve your goals.

Music Career Success Key #4: Have HUGE reasons to achieve your music goals

No matter what you do, something will always go wrong in your music career plans. Whenever you face unexpected events in your music career, this is the time when your commitment will be tested. For example, here are some challenging situations you might face:

Working a day job you hate while lamenting the fact that you never developed a music career backup plan to help you make a living doing what you love.

Playing in crappy bars all the time with your band because you don't know how to move to bigger venues.

Trying to record an album, but doing it at an extremely slow and frustrating pace because you never practiced developing your recording skills.

Working with unmotivated band members who are bringing you (and the entire band) down.

Not understanding how to attract more music fans to listen to the music you worked so hard to create.

Here's what you need to do to stay committed and dedicated to achieving your music career goals:

Take out the piece of paper you have that contains the list of your written goals (that you gathered in key #1 above). Then, next to each one, write the main REASONS you have for pursuing them. For every musical goal you have, answer this question: “Why do I want to achieve this?” Spend a lot of time thinking about this for each objective before writing your answer and review your objectives/reasons twice a day.

When you do this, you will develop the ability to stay motivated and focus on the main reasons you have for achieving your goals. This will help you get through difficult times when your dedication is tested.

Key to success in music career #5 – Don't try to build your music career blindfolded

Once you are in possession of the 4 keys mentioned above, it is still possible that your music career will go nowhere. This happens when you are unsure about what to do to achieve success, you are sabotaging yourself (unknowingly), or you lack effective strategies to help you achieve your musical goals. The last key required to build a successful career in the music industry is to train with a mentor who has experience helping musicians take their careers to the highest level.

A truly effective mentor won't just tell you what you need to do to be successful in the music business. He will help you utilize all of the strengths he built while developing the first four keys and keep you on the right path to success, while preventing you from making the same mistakes that unsuccessful musicians make. Without this type of training, you are essentially trying to build your music career blindfolded, completely oblivious to the best ways to succeed using your current skills and knowledge.

Now that you've learned the five keys that build the foundation of a successful music career, here are the steps you need to take right now:

1. Focus on obtaining all the missing keys that you do not currently own.

2. Be working with an experienced music career mentor to quickly achieve your biggest musical goals.

Tom Hess is a music career mentor, touring musician, and guitarist. He teaches online guitar lessons to musicians around the world and advises musicians on how to build a successful music career. Visit his music instruction website for many free resources for musicians to help you start a career in music and learn about the music industry.