Category: mental models
-
Building Resilience Through Musical Challenges
Resilience isn’t just a general life skill. For me and nearly everyone reading this, it’s integral to surviving (and hopefully thriving) as a musician. Whether we’re navigating creative slumps, technical plateaus, or performance nerves, developing resilience helps us transform obstacles into opportunities for growth. Let’s explore how. The Power of Resilience Every musician faces challenges.…
-
You, the Machine: How to Fine-Tune Your Musical Systems
I know, I know, I know… as musicians, we often like to think of ourselves as purely creative beings. We thrive on creativity, emotion, and connection. Even the mere notion of “thinking of yourself as a machine” can feel stiff or counterintuitive––capable of threatening or diminishing to our artistry. But bare with me for a…
-
Hanlon’s Razor: A Musician’s Guide to Giving the Benefit of the Doubt
A philosophical “razor” is a mental model that seeks to “shave off” some facet of a possible explanation for some given situation or phenomenon. In our recent discussion about Occam’s Razor, we looked at eliminating complexity. Today’s concept seeks to eliminate a common assumption that many of us are known to make all too often…
-
Occam’s Razor: 7 Ways to Simplify and Improve Your Musical Life
Ockham and the Razors. New band name if you want it, but you’ve got to promise me a piece of all your future successes. No? Oh well, I tried… Occam’s Razor, named after 14th-century philosopher William of Ockham, is a principle that suggests that when we’re confronted by multiple explanations or options, the simplest one…
-
Why Mental Models Matter for Musicians: Using Thinking Tools to Improve Practice, Performance, and Your Music Career
Saddle up. This one may be longer than usual but I want to kick off with some fundamentals and a number of solid examples. We’ll be revisiting the concepts below (and many others) at later dates, because there are innumerable ways that they can be applied. Consider this a bit of a primer on where…