‘You can’t always get what you want but if you try some time, you just might find that you get what you need.‘

This is the chorus from a Rolling Stones song from the 1969 album ‘Let It Bleed’. It was one of many Stones’ songs that we covered in one of my first bands. Even though I was only in my teens, I recognised that there was some wisdom in that refrain and now, some fifty-five years later, I still think the same.

I sometimes wake up in the morning with a song going through my head and, if it’s one I like, I don’t really mind. The other day it was this song and it got me thinking about the things I’ve desperately wanted at times in my life and what I ended up getting.

I wanted to be a rock star – I was driven by this for a number of years and even had a record deal but it all fizzled out. Instead I ended up spending twenty five years gigging all around the country and having a whale of a time with my friends. After that, I had a fairly successful career in quality and then at the BBC doing things that I really enjoyed. It turned out okay in the end as I’d have been a terrible rock star anyway.

I wanted to be a ‘serious’ author – I suppose that I have always wanted to write and, in my teens and twenties, I used to read five or six books a week. It was a mixture of sci-fi, crime and ‘serious’ literature (BTW I hate that name as all books are serious, at least for the author). So, I read just about everything by authors such as Steinbeck, Solzhenitsyn, Orwell, Greene, Kesey, Burroughs, Kafka, Gogol, Faulkner, Hemingway etc. I even had a good go at Joyce and Dostoevsky. I did some scribblings when the sprit moved me but a mixture of being a musician and also being dead lazy meant that I got nowhere.

I wanted to be a travel writer – In the early nineties I did a marathon trip around the USA and Canada, going from coast to coast and back again by train which took me over six months. I’d always had an itch to travel but my American trip really came about because I was at a desperately low point in my life. My heart was broken and I’d also been made redundant so, in an act of defiance, I sold my flat and used the money to tour America. I clearly remember waking up on the train at the start of the trip somewhere in Eastern Canada and seeing a small town waking up. I felt smug as I was travelling and having an adventure while they would be in the same place they were the day before. Six months later, I also clearly remember passing by a small town in Montana where people were snugly in their beds and I envied them as they would wake up in the same place that they had gone to bed in. That was the end of the trip for me. I still wanted to write about it though and I had in mind travel books such as ‘On The Road’, ‘Travels with Charlie’ or ‘As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning’. So, I wrote copious notes throughout the trip that detailed all my adventures and, when I got home, I assembled the notes and put them securely in a box. I don’t think I’ve opened that box since.

I came home from my travels expecting nothing. I was broke and with my tail between my legs as I’d talked to everyone about possibly spending some years in America working. Within three months of my return I’d met the woman who would become my wife and companion for over thirty years and, eventually with her help and encouragement, I started writing. I wouldn’t have missed our time together for anything, not even being a rock star.

So, when you get frustrated and feel that you’re not achieving your life goals just relax a bit. What you want might be coming down the track in the future or it might not come at all. Indeed, you might get something far more valuable in its place, something that you didn’t foresee.

What you need.