Achieving Your Musical Potential

I hope that the Big Picture Vision exercise and this idea of Your Musical Core have been enlightening and inspiring for you.

And yet… if experience has taught me anything, it’s that you might immediately also be feeling blocked from that inspiration and aspiration. Perhaps you heard a nagging voice saying “well, that sounds nice… but I’d never actually get there.”

So I want to share with you a set of Pillar Beliefs and Mindsets which can help to quiet that nagging voice, shift some false (and limiting) beliefs about your musical potential, and free you up to proceed through the rest of this book in a way that lets you move at full speed in developing your Core and achieving that Big Picture Vision.

Pillar Beliefs

Everything we do at Musical U is built on four “pillar” beliefs. These emerged over the years not as something hypothetical which we wanted to believe—but as a way to encapsulate what we in the team clearly did believe, and how we do everything we do.

I’d like to offer you these four beliefs, which you can choose to adopt for yourself. You’ll find they can be inspiring, encouraging, supportive, reassuring, comforting—but most of all, empowering.

As you read through these, they may or may not ring true. If any seem fanciful or overly romantic to you now, I’d invite you to return to this chapter again after reading more of the book. You might find, as we have, that these begin to seem less like “beliefs” and more like simple, self-evident truths.

Musical Inside and Out

At Musical U we have a vision of every person on the planet feeling empowered to reach their highest potential in music. We have a firm belief that everyone is already innately musical and has the fundamental capacity to achieve whatever they want to in music.

For historical reasons we’ve ended up with mainstream music education focusing almost exclusively on the “outer” skills of music-making, specifically “how to play an instrument”. The “inner” skills are expected to just magically be there, or somehow automatically develop over time.

While the outer skills are, of course, important, there are three major reasons to really focus on becoming “musical inside and out”:

1. When all you can do is play the notes you’re told to, either from dots on a page or rote-learning, you never feel true ownership of the music. It’s easy to fall into feeling like a music-reproducing robot, and continually reinforce the idea that you’re “not naturally musical”.
2. The inner skills are what create musical freedom for you. Whether that’s playing a song you just heard or remember (without needing to run off and find the sheet music), conjuring up your own musical ideas on-the-fly in improvisation or composing, or just knowing you’ve “got music inside you” and will have something of value to contribute when joining in with other musicians—until you feel like you’re bringing the music out from inside you, you’ll never feel truly free in music.
3. It’s aligned with the natural spirit of music. Throughout the ages, music has been a natural part of what it means to be human, and the deep biological connection to music-making is very much an “inside and out” phenomenon.

This is a vital belief to adopt because without it, you’ll be prone to the biggest danger to your musical success: losing hope.

The “inner skills” being missing from almost all mainstream music education is no small part of why a heart-breakingly high proportion of people who start learning an instrument give up within their first 18 months.

The sad state of things in almost every country around the world is that most people consider themselves not musically gifted or not naturally musical. And even those who have devoted hours, weeks, months, years, in some cases even decades of their life to learning music, still feel predominantly un-natural with it.

The reason? They’ve only been shown how to be musical “on the outside”, not how to bring the music out from inside themselves.

The more we can empower you to be Musical Inside And Out, the more fulfilled you will be and the higher potential you will be able to reach in music.

(Side note: the word “voice” in the definition above wasn’t an accident. We also believe that singing is your natural first instrument, and every musician should be a singer too. But more on that in a later chapter…)

Universal Potential

The vision we have is one in which everyone takes for granted that they can learn all of the amazing skills of musicality we discussed in the last chapter.

Nice idea. But is it really possible?

Improvising, playing by ear, jamming, performing with confidence, writing music, singing, having great rhythm, collaborating easily with other musicians…

If you took a random 100 people on the street, I bet 95 of them would say:

“You’ve got to have a gift to do that”

“You’ve got to be talented to do that.”

“I can’t do that. I’m not naturally musical.”

With our members inside Musical U, we see clear proof every day that these things are all learnable, and by anyone. We have seen so many examples of breakthroughs and transformations and of those identity shifts from “I am learning music” or “I’m just a hobbyist” to “I’ve got that instinct, I’ve got that intuition for how to play. I can pick up my instrument, and the music comes from inside me, out through my instrument.”

Sadly that’s just not the case in the vast majority of music education (online or offline). If you look around, most everyone is still learning from notation, they’re learning by rote memorisation or from a step-by-step video tutorial. They’re feeling like they can only play the notes somebody else has told them to play. And that is a huge part of why most end up feeling disillusioned and very low in musical self-esteem.

The Universal Potential belief says that every music learner is different, but all have the potential to become a highly capable musician and feel fulfilled in reaching their own true potential in music.

Everyone’s musical journey is uniquely their own. The fact that everyone can do this does not mean everyone is exactly the same in music, or that a single “method” can magically work perfectly for everyone. It just means everyone is capable of the highest heights.

It’s also important to know that adults and children each have their own advantages in learning. We find a lot of people start out thinking “kids can learn music quickly but it’s harder for adults.” And there’s a grain of truth to that. As a parent myself, I can attest that kids certainly can be “like a sponge” for new learning!

But adults have more discipline and persistence. They have clearer motivation (especially if armed with a well-defined Big Picture Vision!). They can more easily plan and structure their practice. They can comprehend more advanced concepts more quickly. They have a lifetime of absorbed musical knowledge in their subconscious that they can draw on, a stronger instinctive sense of “how music works”. And, as you’re demonstrating right now by reading this book, they have an unlimited capacity to continue learning and striving to reach their fullest potential.

I’d also like to mention in passing that the scientific research on brain plasticity, coupled with the accelerated learning and rapid memorisation techniques you’ll be learning about later in this book, mean that it’s entirely realistic to expect yourself to learn as fast, if not much faster, as an adult than you would have as a kid.

So this belief is, in a way, a rejection of two false beliefs many adult musicians are burdened by:

• The talent myth (“those people can do it, but I can’t, because I’m not naturally good enough”)— more on that below when we talk about Growth Mindset.
• The age myth (“it’s too late for me. I wish I’d started learning music as a kid, or kept it up instead of letting it fall aside over time. Now it’s unrealistic for me to still reach my musical dreams”)

The Universal Potential belief flips both of those on their head, and empowers you to achieve everything you’ve been dreaming of.

So when we talk about our vision of “a world of natural musicians” we’re really talking about a world where anyone, from age 5 up to age 105, knows with certainty: “I can learn whatever I want to in music. Those amazing musicians I admire, I could be like them.”

Instead of generation after generation being trained as musical robots, we aim to put musicality back at the heart of music education, the way it genuinely was centuries ago when these things were taken for granted as an inherent part of what it meant to “be a musician”.

Better Together

Confession time: I nearly didn’t include any community features in Musical U when we launched it in 2015.

As a firm introvert myself, who is perfectly happy going for days on end without speaking to another living soul, as well as being a scientifically-minded person who’s generally focused on methods and exercises and practical solutions, the idea of adding “social chit-chat” to our training website didn’t strike me as a particularly helpful thing to do. In fact, I was worried it would dilute the effectiveness of everyone’s musicality training, by providing constant distraction like social media.

Fortunately I listened to wiser, more experienced online educators. And the results soon blew me away.

From the very beginning the power of community became clear.

We saw members learning tips and tricks from each other as much as from the material we provided. We were able to continually improve the material based on their shared experiences. And what surprised me most was the clear power of community to inspire and motivate our members, and keep them in continual momentum with their training.

On top of that, having access to personal help from a human expert was an absolute game-changer for our members. It really is a night-and-day difference.

We saw that the members who thrived and had the biggest breakthroughs were those who engaged most with the community and support on offer, while those who kept quiet and just used the material in isolation had good, but much lesser results. There was, and still is, a clear correlation between community engagement and results.

Community acts as an amplifier for everything you do. When you’re sharing that journey with other people, it expands and accelerates what you do, and everyone gets better together.

That’s true inside Musical U, but it is true universally. Whatever musical community you can assemble around you can have the same effect.

I’ll be honest—there’s a small part of me that wishes this wasn’t true!

Like with anything involving human beings, it makes everything more complicated. Part of me still wishes we could just create good material, hand it over, and be done with it! But with almost a decade of experience running the membership, I know it would be a crime against the people who come to us for musicality training to do that.

A book like this is, by nature, something you go through alone. But like I mentioned in the introduction, I knew it couldn’t just be “a textbook”. And I knew we had to make sure we really emphasised this Pillar Belief for you.

Don’t make the mistake of trying to “go it alone” in music.

The second part of this belief is about collaboration not competition, and I’d suggest thinking about that in two ways:

Firstly, if you’re encountering musicians who are competitive, and elitist, and exclusionary—please run in the other direction, fast.

There is still a lot of that going on in certain musical communities. It’s a painful byproduct of the “talent myth”, everyone trying to prove that they are special. We’re all special. Surround yourself with musicians who believe that too, and who will build you up, not tear you down.

The other way to think about this is when choosing who to learn from in music. I’m happy to say that across all the online music educators I’ve had the pleasure to connect with over the past 15 years or so, the majority do share this spirit of collaboration. Like us, they’re happy to recommend another provider or resource than their own if it will better serve the student. It’s why we have a prominent “Friends” page on our public website, why we’re regularly recommending other resources to our members, and why we’re vocal about the vision and mission we’re pursuing—because we’ll get there much faster if we’re all working together.

Enjoying the Journey

We’ve touched on this one in various ways already, so hopefully you’ve already gathered that our goal with this book (and everything we do at Musical U) is absolutely to help you achieve real concrete results—but with a spirit of ease and joy. Not the painful drudgery, beating yourself up, and brute-force approach which is unfortunately the default in status quo music education.

Your musical journey can be just as rich, varied, and limitless as music itself.

There is, of course, enormous value in setting clear goals, being diligent and consistent about pursuing them, practicing carefully, and “putting in the work”.

But the surprising truth is that “fun” is not the opposite of “learning”.

As you’ll be discovering later in the book, adding more creativity, exploration, experimentation, and a spirit of play to your music learning actually makes it more effective, not less.

We see so many musicians who’ve fallen into the trap of thinking if they want better results, they have to work harder. If they’re enjoying themselves too much, they must be doing it wrong. Gradually all the life and enthusiasm gets sucked out of their music-making.

This is another common reason for people to give up completely. Even worse, they walk away from music blaming themselves, thinking they “didn’t have what it takes” or “didn’t have enough discipline”.

The truth is they just forgot about Enjoying The Journey.

As adult learners we tend to be particularly prone to this. A lifetime of “should”s, a factory-style education system, and endless rote-learning have drilled into most of us that learning is “hard work” and if you don’t struggle and suffer, you won’t get results. The saying “no pain, no gain” is perhaps the clearest description of that attitude. In Chapter 6: Superlearning we’ll unpack this in more detail, because there is a grain of truth to it. Overall though, it will tend to lead you in exactly the wrong direction in music learning, and threaten the very passion that keeps you moving forwards.

You’ll find that this book is packed with ways to develop your musicality while keeping your passion for music burning bright. Just remember that enjoying yourself can actually be a sign you’re doing it right.