Make Practice Perfect

As musicians we’re all constant works-in-progress. Picture a your favorite musical moments from even the most gifted of musicians/artists alike and I guarantee you at some point one of them will admit that during one of those times, they felt they were not performing to the best of their capabilities.  It’s an inevitable facet of the human existence, and a necessary hurdle to jump early on in your artistic career. Plain and simple. We cant be “on” everyday. On the flipside, there are things we CAN do to eliminate this truth from ever obstructing our creative improvement ever again.

It’s similar to the adage of “doing the best you can,” and in the unavoidable events where things still go awry, it means cultivating a resilience that comes from being experienced enough that your “mistakes” are good ones- or not noticeably mistakes at all.

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On Innovation, Flying Deloreans & Explosions In The Desert

Innovators are a strange breed. What makes them move ahead against all odds? Especially hopping over the road blocks and avoiding the potholes placed there by zealous department heads who are managing according to company policy and frameworks, plans, etc. The very fact that a plan is notated and written places it firmly lying down in the past, while the innovators are working in the present, edging toward the unknown of a future.

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest New Yorker article, “Creation Myth - Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation” is a must read for all those in a business that fosters creativity for both fun and profit. While Gladwell details the failings of the day-to-day managers who ran Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), and the bigger corporate brass of Xerox, to fully understand the future of personal computing as a mega-billion dollar industry, the article does impart a different view to the oft-held idea that Steve Jobs stole his future Macintosh while the giant of a Xerox slumbered away. Basically, Gladwell asks, what did Xerox know about computers and building a whole new industry based on the cool things their engineers had created in Palo Alto?

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