Pursue Your Passion

Barry Casson is, indisputably, a man who gets the most out of life. At various points, he has toured abroad as a musician with the likes of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, published thousands of news photographs, brought important stories into people’s living rooms as a television cameraman, created highly acclaimed movies, started Vancouver Island’s first film school and taught several generations of performers to play drums.

These days, as an author and public speaker, Barry is harnessing his passion and lifetime of experiences into inspirational talks and presentations based on his new book, How to Become Who You Were Meant to Be. Imparting the valuable lessons and wisdom he has acquired through hard work, determination and plain, old-fashioned gumption, Barry firmly believes we all have it in us to reach our full potential.

“I want people to invest in what they are gifted in to lead a good life,” he says. “I don’t care who you are, everyone has a gift. If you can, follow that gift because that’s the only thing that will make you happy. Whatever it is, do that thing. That’s what I have done. In my case, it’s morphed. When I did photography, I was really into it. When I did filmmaking, I was really into it.”

“When you are in your element, it doesn’t matter if you are working eight hours or 16 hours, you’re alive because you are doing what you want to do. We have all heard the phrase ‘starving artist,’ and many of them are. I know some artists who are not very wealthy, but they are very happy, because they are doing what they were meant to do,” he says.

Citing a Forbes magazine report, which pointed out that most working Americans were unhappy in their jobs, Barry declares, “You won’t be happy in a job you don’t want.”

And, he emphasizes, it is never too late to find one’s passion. As a drum teacher, he sees retired professional people who are now “doing what they always wanted to do – which is play drums. It makes them happy.”

The equation is simple but not necessarily easy, Barry stresses. “Life comes down to two things, you either do it or you don’t do it. It’s not complicated. It’s finding the chutzpah and the energy and dealing with what comes with the challenge when you take it on. It ain’t a piece of cake.”

In How to Become Who You Were Meant to Be, Barry goes through 10 methods he used to accomplish his goals. The book, which includes a foreword by his friend and former bandmate David Foster, also chronicles inspiring stories from different times in his life and underscores the lessons to be learned from them.

On some occasions, Barry confronted tricky circumstances during which belief in himself, he writes, was not enough. Rather, he needed to also take action. As a young musician in the 1960s, for example, he suspected that his rock group, the Victoria-based Bobby Faulds and the Strangers, might have a shot at the big time. He managed, after scouting the music scene in London for a few weeks, to convince his six fellow band members, three of whom were married, to leave their day jobs and wives and fly to England.

As Barry details in the book, by daring to take a chance, experiences the band members could not have possibly imagined beforehand began to unfold as they circumnavigated the United Kingdom, hopping from one venue to the next, meeting rock ‘n’ roll royalty and establishing a name for themselves.

Several years later, back in Canada and appearing at a nightly gig on drums at a Victoria nightclub, he searched for something to keep him occupied in the daytime. An interest in photography ensued. One day, Barry worked up the nerve to show a number of his photographs to the local daily, The Times Colonist.

“Hi, my name is Barry Casson. I thought you might like to look at… ahh… my-my photos,” he recalls saying to the city editor, seated at his desk not bothering to take his eyes off what he was reading.

Barry placed his photos down on the desk. After a couple of minutes, the editor finally looked up and asked, “Was there anything else?” “Ah… no…” came Barry’s response before leaving.

The next day, he picked up a copy of the paper and there was his photo splashed on the front page of the local section, launching the next phase of his fascinating career.

The central take-aways, Barry notes, from this turning point are to keep moving forward, not letting the fear of failure prevent one from doing what one cares about and recognizing the “sudden instances that seem unspectacular at the time can be life changing.”

In segueing to another pursuit in the 1980s, filmmaking, Barry persevered through a series of hurdles, both technical and financial, to create educational motion pictures that are still etched in the collective memory, especially among former Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, to this day.

According to Barry, his best-known work, Lost in the Woods, a film teaching survival in nature, might not have been shown throughout North America had he ignored some of the steps outlined in his book, such as making a list of things to do and crossing out each item before moving to the next, realizing that many projects take longer than expected to complete and, most importantly, remembering “that nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”

Besides encouraging and motivating people to fulfill their dreams, Barry still chases after his own passions; he can be found in Victoria teaching drummers of all ages at Tempo Trend Music and jamming with friends, old and new, at Hermann’s Jazz Club.

As for relaying what he knows to others, Barry asserts, “I think I am at the right place to pass on what I have learned. When I see some inspirational speakers who are 30 years old telling others how to live their lives, I think to myself, ‘You haven’t even lived your life. How do you know? ‘I can tell you because I have been there, and I have done it. You have to go through a lot to be able to help others.”

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