It’s my 30th birthday today, I am sitting here at my friend’s house in Ibiza and there is not a cloud in the sky and all that has put me in a very reflective mood.  After trying several times to come up with a nice well thought out subject to share my view on, I am still stuck on finding one single subject to talk about.  It’s not that I can’t think of anything to say, it’s just that each topic seems to open up so many thoughts that I would end up writing a book instead of page or two.  So it got me thinking, how did I end up where I am today.

In 1997 I finished my college course (I studied computing) and took a full time job in the supermarket that I had been working at on Saturdays while I was studying.  It was around the same time that I had decided I wanted to live a different lifestyle.  I was known as always being the one at company parties to be dancing on the tables by the end of the night and saying all sorts of offensive remarks to the managers, and up until this point, I was very pleased with that view.  I had made a decision though, I had been brought up as a Christian, and had taken it seriously, but felt very caught up in two different worlds.  Worlds that as someone brought up in a Christian background during the 80’s & 90’s you were taught that are very different and that you should stay well away from anything that wasn’t Christian.  So my decision was that from that moment on I would be a different person.  That I would like as I felt Jesus would have lived, with his values and character as much as possible. 

Just a few weeks after this I can remember my old pastor giving a sermon about the ethics of work.  It was one of the few talks that I have ever heard in my entire life that I can still remember to this day.  The shortened version of this talk was that no job has meaning; you have to take meaning to the job.  It didn’t matter if you were a fireman, shop assistant, factory worker, banker, lawyer etc. etc. If you didn’t take the meaning to your job then it was worthless.  There is obviously a lot more to that discussion, and I am not looking to go into the theology of that now.  But that one talk changed my life.  I decided that if I was working in a supermarket I was going to be the best worker that they had.  Instead of trying to get by with just doing what I had to do, I would make each day a personal challenge to get every item out of the stock room and onto the shelf, and it was great.  I would listen to people in the staff room moaning about how much work they had and how a much better job must be waiting, yet I was loving it.  There was now no one else in the store that could fill a shelf as fast as me, I was working harder than ever, yet I was really enjoying it.  Something had really changed and people noticed it too. 

Within a few weeks it was a regular thing that the other lads on my department and I would be loading up trolleys full of stock higher and higher in a bid to work faster than the others.  It made it fun. It meant we worked harder, our bosses were happy and the relationship between us all improved to the point that we started hanging out a bit outside work. I left there to go and work on a farm, and took the same attitude with me.  Although it was now about 4 years ago that I left that job, I am still very good friends with the owner and the other guy that worked there (there were only 3 of us).

I had started DJing while I was at college at friends' parties and went on to do bigger and bigger events as time went on.  While working on the farm I had my own radio show for a while and also setup Rubik Records with Doug.  After leaving the farm I worked for a Church as a youth worker and also the local council as a youth worker (at the same time).  It was only in late 2004 that I became full time as a DJ/Producer. In 2005 my wife and I moved to Ibiza to work with 24-7 Prayer (www.24-7prayer.com) to establish a base on the island.  So that’s where we are now.  I still run Spearhead Records, which I setup in 2005 (Doug now runs Rubik Records). I am working on some new music that should be released next year, and then giving a lot of time to 24-7 Ibiza (as we have now called it).  You can check out www.24-7ibiza.com for more details.

So I guess that doesn’t really tell you anything about how to set up a record label, how to DJ or anything that seems directly linked to music.  However, this is what I believe is the key.  We need to focus on character and not gifting.  We have all been given different gifts, but gifts are given for free, it’s about how we use them that counts.  That is where your character comes in, and that you can constantly work on.

A couple of years back I felt challenged about this whole work ethics thing again.  I was really feeling like no one else around me really understood what I was trying to achieve.  I had set up my record label and in drum ‘n’ bass circles it was doing fairly well.  But if I wanted to talk to someone at Church about it or get some support, no one really seemed to understand.  Just as I was getting myself worked up about it all, that old talk came back to mind.  Then I thought about a friend of mine that is an architect, who owns his own business and is very successful in that field.  Another friend came to mind, whose job I don’t even really understand, but I know he is very well respected and is often asked to write articles for well known world wide publications.  It suddenly became obvious to me that no one really understands what I was doing, but I didn’t understand what they were doing either.  That’s when I realised that it didn’t actually matter.  We needed to focus on what we did understand about each other, share the common ground, and help each other to develop our character.  I may work with vinyl, my friend may work with houses, but the reality is, we all work with people.  People that have the same needs as each other, people that want to be listened to, people that want to be shown kindness, and people looking for the truth. 

I was a hard working shelf stacker, I am now a hard working record label boss.  I love to make people laugh, inspire people and take things further than anyone else ever has done.  And that would apply to any job that I decided to do.

So if I have got one clear point to make here, it’s that we need to work on our character.  The time has come to stop worrying about others not understanding what our job is, and to start understanding that we are all in this together.

That’s all for now.

Steve

P.S.  If you want to know more about music stuff then you can check out www.myspace.com/bcee or www.myspace.com/spearheadrecords.