Why Musicians Are Natural Entrepreneurs

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En provenance du cours de Berklee College of Music

Creativity And Entrepreneurship

19 notes

Berklee College of Music

Creativity And Entrepreneurship

19 notes

Cours 4 sur 4 dans Specialization Music Business

Creativity & Entrepreneurship will help you tap into your inner creativity and learn how to leverage it for career development or business innovation. Presented by Berklee Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship founder Panos Panay, this course features interviews with world renown entrepreneurs, innovators, songwriters, producers, creative directors, educators, performers, visual artists and chefs as they discuss parallels between the creative and entrepreneurial journeys. The course approaches entrepreneurship as a creative process, a fundamental human instinct that we all possess and can unlock. Creativity & Entrepreneurship applies concepts from the creative and musical creation process, such as observing, prototyping, iterating and embracing failure, as a means of guiding you through the concept of thinking like a startup. You will develop the basic mindset, knowledge, and insights required to pursue an entrepreneurial career, whether as the steward of your own career or as the founder of a new business in any field. Creativity & Entrepreneurship is about the side of entrepreneurship you won’t learn at a business school but, instead, in the music studio. What you'll learn: How to approach your career or startup as if learning a musical instrument Why entrepreneurship, like creativity, is something we all possess How to apply “the musician mindset” as means to collaboration and creative problem solving Why songwriting is a perfect parallel to career and product development Why there’s more to entrepreneurship than business plans and spreadsheets much like there’s more to music than scales and lead sheets

À partir de la leçon

Inspiration: The Entrepreneurial Mindset

In this first lesson, we'll discuss what "entrepreneurship" actually means. We'll take a look at the process of innovation and identify common traits that all successful innovators have. We'll also discuss commonalities between musicians and entrepreneurs and why musicians are excellent entrepreneurs. Finally, we'll end the lesson by learning how to observe the world around you with an entrepreneurial mindset.

Why Musicians Are Natural Entrepreneurs5:24

5 Skills of Successful Innovators5:49

Learning To Observe4:36

Rencontrer les enseignants

Panos Panay
Course Author
Berklee Online

You may think why am I filming a course in entrepreneurship with the stage as a backdrop?

In many ways, there are so many commonalities between

a performer and musician and the act of being an entrepreneur.

If you think about the whole process of learning how to play music,

it starts with the act of listening and you simply can't be

a performing musician unless you become really

good at listening and observing the environment around you,

and in a similar way you cannot be an entrepreneur unless

you're good at empathizing and observing the environment around you.

Musicians are fantastic about collaboration.

Music is by nature a collaborative process where you bring in a number of

different people from different disciplines and

different backgrounds to create a unified whole.

That's what the song is,

that's what the performance is.

Bringing people together is at the core of all of this because a musician might think,

"Oh if only I can get the instrument to

perform the way I want it to and that's my craft."

Or an engineer might think,

"If only I get this piece of steel to support a certain weight or

this jet engine to go across a certain distance and that's what I have to do."

Getting human beings to cooperate in

intricate systems is the core of what makes entrepreneurial venture successful.

When I'm looking for a team,

I'm looking for people that can fill the creative slots,

people that can feel the technological slots,

people that can fill the business slots and people that really get off on that thing,

because there's nothing worse than assigning

the Internet social media task to somebody who feels like a HTML coding is drudgery.

I want people who you know,

you're going to be coding all day anyway because that's what you do.

So because it's what you do, do this for me.

You're going to be writing a song today anyway so write a song with me.

Passion is a huge part of it.

Perhaps the most striking thing about learning music is that you

understand that failure is part of the process.

When you pick up an instrument for the first time whether it's a trumpet,

a guitar bass you probably sound pretty bad,

much to the chagrin of your parents, but what do you do?

You stick to it. You understand that failure is

part of the process and it's part of the journey of becoming better

and the best entrepreneurs out there see this process of constant iteration through

failing as part of the journey of what will

make them and their product and their company great.

How critical is failure to the creative process?

I'm the first one to raise myself. I failed.

The point is to use your failures,

I think, to achieve progress.

And progress is the key.

And so admitting failure helps other people and your team learn.

Okay, this person admits they made a mistake,

but then also being able to say well where did it fail?

Here's why it failed?

Here's what I'm trying to achieve,

and now here's where I'm progressing.

Musicians are also great at balancing structure with ambiguity.

In jazz there is always the chord progressions that remain constant,

but through the act of improvisation it often

takes you into places that are unexplored and new.

Improvisation is key both in

music as well as in thinking and acting like an entrepreneur.

And lastly this is my favorite,

one of my all time idols, Sonny Rollins,

said that every time he played a solo

he had to go through this process of learning how to unlearn.

Learning how not to repeat themselves.

And entrepreneurship is the act of constant renewal.

It's the act of applying the mindset of a newborn on to new challenges and new problems,

so that you are able to garner new insights and perhaps in

the process innovate and create something new that nobody's expecting.

It's really important nowadays to reinvent yourself

every day so that you stay relevant within the music industry,

because it's very easy to depend on other people to push

your career and people that have calculated what works right now,

but it's a totally different thing to be able to

invent something and to create something new.

I've been a songwriter for 40 years,

so being a songwriter for that long has been more about

having a sustained practice of creativity and creativity isn't like a gift.

I think it's something you make time for.

Twyla Tharp talks about, it she has an amazing book about

creativity and that it's that your butt has to go in the chair and you have to work,

you have to do the work, you have to show up for

the muse so that the muse can show up for you.

So perhaps there's more to this connection of musicality and entrepreneur.

Maybe it's not a coincidence that even some of

the world's biggest companies like Apple and

Microsoft are co-founded by active and performing musicians.

So as we go through this journey of developing the entrepreneurial mindset

and exploring the commonalities between creativity and entrepreneurship,

I'd like challenge it to see how you can apply these lessons and

these findings in this particular mindset onto whatever you'd like to do,

whether that is your career and your enterprise you're looking to start,

or bringing this thought process and this

application into the company that you're working in right now.

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