David Geffen: Impact On The Music And Film Industry

David Geffen is and has been a tremendous music entrepreneur, with an enormous impact on the music and film industry. His personality is notorious for being brutally honest, gregarious, and usually right when he makes big business decisions. He has worked with huge names like Neil Young and Bob Dylan and has played a huge role in delivering the public the music that is so often considered the classics. When artists and film makers alike felt they needed some managing, they would take it to David Geffen where they knew they would get an honest answer on what they needed to change. David, a man fro New York had stumbled across the entrepreneurial lifestyle after watching his mom who was a saleswoman in a small shop. His two most successful traits
in my opinion would be his ability to befriend people, especially the artists like John Lennon and Bob Dylan, and secondly his die-hard work ethic.
After he sold his business at one point, he thought he would be happy because he made a ton of money on the deal, but what he didn’t realize is that he simply loves the work that he does, and that he didn’t want to stop working.

The area of David Geffen’s Career that I am most impressed by is his ambition to succeed. In my future career, I hope to pretty much do exactly as he did. I want t be a musical entrepreneur and hopefully one day open a music venue or a label or potentially be a music agent. David didn’t let any obstacles stop him on his path to success, even when he was in difficult periods of his career. One thing that I would like to translate to my future career is his ways of going into the unknown and just reaching out a hand and pulling back something
great. For example, David talked about how Bob Dylan had always been his biggest dream of getting to produce one of his albums, and even though he didn’t know him personally at the time he found a way to get introduced and befriend him. After gaining Bob Dylan’s friendship and trust, they were able to work together and rely of the success of each other. Because of David Geffen’s success, I am inspired to get my name out there and socially network as much as possible. David was able to get his name out there by networking like crazy, and using the people he did know to get to the people he didn’t but wanted to get to know. So my new goal after learning about David Geffen’s career is to network myself, as much as possible. I am going to do that by trying to help out everyone I can, even for free like David did, in order to get the ball rolling and show how you can be personally helpful, before the other party decided to help your right back. David somehow was able to meet all of the big name musical celebrities that he wanted to, and work with them from his ability to socialize, and I will use his same methodology to network.

David Geffen has taught me many lessons for how to succeed in the music industry.
The first step to success is to define your goals of what you want to do and who you want to be like in your future. David decided at an early stage in life that he wanted to be like Louis B. Mayer, which helped him set his path. The second step is to form opinions that you truly believe is the right thing to do and not based off necessarily what others think is right. The third step may seem obvious but it’s to stand by your opinions and not get pushed over by the ‘bigger dog’. When you have an opinion, often just stating it wont get anywhere, but if you stand by it and truly believe in it, that is when your opinion starts to matter. The fourth step is to network like crazy. David success didn’t come from him his own musical recordings but rather from the success of other artists and later movie producers. The trick is to know as many people as you can that can hook you up with extremely helpful resources. The more people you know the better the odds are that you will get into contact with someone that you can benefit greatly off of. And fifth step to success would be to truly do what you love, and not do it just for the money. After David had talked to his mom about when she left her job she said that she had never been happier. David ended up selling his hard earned company for a lot of money, but he realized that what he wanted most wasn’t necessarily just the money, but he truly loved to
work. After he realized he made the wrong decision he had to work his way back into the industry just to work again.