Question: Who are the most innovative people?
It’s not simply a matter of innate talents or predispositions, as Amanda Lang demonstrates in her book, The Power of Why, but rather the fostering and preserving of our natural curiousity.
The word natural is key here, because we’re ALL born curious. It’s how we oriented to the world and learned critical skills like language and mobility.
Obviously innovation and creativity are REALLY important in the music industry, so I wanted to share my thoughts about this terrific read while they’re fresh.
Thinking back on it now, I wonder how many more of us would have followed more artistic pursuits, if outside-the-box thinking had been more encouraged as we grew older.
As Amanda points out, the current school system of memorizing and regurgitating facts doesn’t exactly promote original thinking.
Nor does having to come up with a single ‘right’ answer encourage creativity – though it does seem to make a lot of people afraid of ever being wrong.
In the context of a music artist, that can result in producing copycats of other people’s music, rather than standing out with your own brand.
Which you would kick a** at by the way, because that’s the stuff you would intuitively pick up faster and rock at. But that’s a rant for another day.
We get frightened over time, of sticking our necks out, breaking the status quo, etc. And again, that’s not a natural state – insecurity has been practically baked into the whole Western approach.
For an artist, breaking out of this sedentary kind of thinking isn’t just healthy for us personally – it can reap huge rewards for the world (and our bank account, of course).
To start however, Amanda urges us to ‘hit control-alt-delete’ on the underlying assumptions we unthinkingly operate under, and go back to more fundamental questions.
For example, why do you like producing music? Why do others like hearing your music? Or even, why do people like listening to music at all?
Answering these questions might seem long and tedious, but they create the space you need to develop your own particular sound.
For example – and I’m just spitballing here – maybe you realize what you like most about music is how it brings people together.
That gets you thinking about genres of music that have a BIG sound, the kind that people want to share, or that hypes up a crowd. From there you can get into the particulars of how you might embiggen your sound, and so on.
Over the chapters that follow, Amanda suggests a number of other ways we can all encourage more innovative thinking, including:
- Taking yourself out of your comfort zone. Work at an unusual time of night, force yourself to come up with 50 song ideas in one day, whatever it takes.
- Taking yourself out of your normal mindset – picturing yourself as a 7 year old for example, or producing music for a stranger in a far off land.
- Find out what no one else is doing – especially if they say something like ‘it’s just not done’ – and do that.
- Borrow from other fields. For example, if you’re struggling to produce a specific kind of sound, talk to foley artists. Talk to movie composers. Talk to sound testers for apps like Alexa.
- Collaborate with others with widely differing perspectives, ethnicities, views on life, etc.
- If possible, also work with others comfortable giving (and taking) criticism.
Speaking of criticism, many of us – Canadians especially – need to get more comfortable with the dreaded ‘F word’.
I’m talking about failure; that word that masquerades as something unforgivable, but paves the road to every new discovery.
I see fear of failure in most of the people I meet – even children. Without changing that mindset, many of them will always be afraid to go through the necessary pain of growth.
Which is tragic, because a life half-lived is the ONLY failure you can’t get back up from.
Another danger, Amanda warns us, is when we assume others, particularly clients and the people we work with, think the same way we do.
Like the aforementioned donkey, this kind of thinking causes disconnects with our fellow musicians and audience. And we end up looking just like an… Well, a donkey.
Ultimately, learning to be more innovative boils down to embracing the uncomfortable. But here’s the silver lining: You can take it as slowly as you like.
So try something different: Mike an instrument differently, add strange effects, watch a YouTube video and create something with what you learned, whatever.
The more comfortable you get with being uncomfortable, the farther you’ll be able to push towards being the artist you’re capable of becoming. Who knows where you’ll end up?
Photo Credits:
‘Brown Bread on White Table’ by Anna Tis from Pexels
‘Group of People dancing Tiogether’ by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels
‘Group of Police Officer’ by Pixabay from Pexels
‘Kitten Cat Baby’ by rihaij on Pixabay
‘Man Performing on Stage’ by Wendy Wei from Pexels
‘Man Wearing a Jacket Covering His Mouth’ by Ekaterina Belinskaya from Pexels
‘Man Wearing White and Black Stripped Shirt’ by Thoma Boehi on Pexels