Learning — Blog — The Entrepreneurial Musician

This clip from professional tuba player Jasmine Pigott covers an awful lot of the artistic journey in less than 30 seconds.

She talks about needing to learn how to improvise for a section of a piece that called for soloing when she had no experience improvising whatsoever.

The first part of this clip sure sounded familiar to me: She just avoided it! And then worked on the rest of the solo instead.

The following is me connecting the dots for her but I’m guessing she felt pretty productive by practicing the rest of the solo, even though deep down she knew she was putting off the truly hard work.

I know I’ve certainly used that tactic many times, both on the playing side and the business side of my career.

The problem is that I’m too “smart” to knowingly avoid it. I have to trick myself into thinking that I’m avoiding it for a good reason - in this case that the entire rest of the solo needed learning.

I love the message of the second part of this clip. Once she stopped avoiding it she acquired a new skill simply through lots of trial and error.

Not by watching one more YouTube video on the subject.

Not by thinking more or better or smarter.

By actually doing it (trial) and doing it poorly (error.)

No one has ever claimed to learn something by trial. It’s always by trial and error.

We have to allow ourselves to not sound good or to price something wrong or to botch an album release.

That simply gets us one step closer to sounding good, nailing our pricing or having a successful album release.

So make sure there are enough trials and not only expect but embrace the errors.

If you do both of those things, good things will happen.

Thanks for the lesson, Jasmine!