What do I enjoy and hate about teaching guitar lessons?

Living the life of a struggling musician.

My first job was as a paperboy for the Milwaukee Sentinel, way back in 1975. I was 12 years old. Imagine delivering papers in a -20° blizzard at 4am. By the time I was in high school, I was working at a local bakery. In 1988, I moved to Florida and started working at Orlando International Airport. Then, in 1996, I began my teaching career as a guitar instructor at a local music store. It was a whole new world for me. Once I got used to teaching lessons, I began to really like it a lot. To me, it wasn’t work. I had worked jobs, and this was anything but laborious. Having been an instrumentalist/musician since I was a teenager, the very idea that I could actually make a meager living showing other people how to play the guitar, was something I had never considered before.

It took a while for me to get used to a less stable income. In fact, times got pretty hard. I eventually had to come to terms with the simple fact that teaching music in a music store or at someone's house would never m…