Three things sax taught me about working hard and being a perfectionist
In this posting from the LinkedIn Agency Influencer program, Carat’s Robert Christian argues that the best way to get good at something is to first be bad at something over and over and over again…
When I was in year one, I took up the violin. After a couple of years though, I realised that while I was pretty warm on the trail, my true passion was somewhere else.
When my older cousin – who I thought was very cool – came down to the prep school with the saxophone ensemble (again, very cool), I found it. A year later I started sax myself, and for the next ten years, barely a day passed that I didn’t play.
My teacher was a fairly remarkable man. Originally from Egypt, trained to a musical doctorate at an institute in Berlin, there was never any doubt that he was much too talented and dedicated to have to listen to young whelps shriek out scales on instruments their parents were already regretting buying them.
I learned guitar at prep school – still trying to learn 40 years later – and I always remember saying “Practice makes perfect” and being told that wasn’t correct. If you did a forward roll sideways, then you’d get good at doing a forward roll sideways but not be able to do a perfect forward roll. So my teacher – as did yours – said “Perfect practice makes perfect”.
Still think about that to this day as I pick up the guitar to keep practicing. Must be something about music teachers 😉