I previously wrote: A long time away saying of Bruno Medicina ».
EN: Mozart, Beethoven, all the great geniuses, broke the rules and won. We like them because they had results when they broke the rules.
Yet the top students today are forced, in the institutional education system, to obey the rules. They perform well in spite of the fact that they can’t/shouldn’t break the rules.
I was recently faced with another thought: what if there are two stages in a person’s life – a formation period, in which the student should memorize things and follow the rules, and another period, in which the person can use creativity.
My personal thought on this idea is that it does have some value, I think I see where it’s coming from, but I tend to disagree.
If you can’t create at all, if, for one reason or another, you don’t have the courage to let your emotions go, sure, memorize and repeat.
But if you wish to create, and you’re a young person (in body or spirit) and you want to start not with following the rules, but by playing your own tunes, why not?
I think it will help you more in your development if you create, you get feedback, and now when you will learn something, you’ll learn based on your feedback.
Sure, it might hurt to create in a world of copy-paste-ers, sure, you’ll get burned a lot of times for not doing something perfectly.
But I do consider that this feedback will help you grow more than just by repeating and mimicking others’ songs.
Try, do it wrong, get negative feedback, learn better this time, with all your ears open, try some more, be better – I think this is the way to grow, and not „learn for 10-20 years, than you can start creating your own songs”. I don’t consider a latter option is a real option, but a fake one.
If I were to choose between:
- Taking a course online in order to learn a skill;
- Taking a real-life project but safe-to-fail project, and learn as-I-go the skills needed;
, I think that the latter option is the better (the idea is not mine, but I don’t know, at this point, who to credit).
Start, try, create, compose, and fail. Fail big and fail often. Try not to harm others when failing. But use the feed-back to be better, to learn easier, to become a better you – in my opinion, that’s the way to go, and not „try to memorize what others have done before you, and at some point, maybe, perhaps, you will be allowed to create”.
PS, 2021.02.04: When you hold a presentation, you have two big options:
- You can read a text fully from a slide;
- You can just write a sentence, and you will speak freely during the presentation;
The thing is, when you talk freely, you’re more engaged, passionate. Even if the text is not so good as a pre-made one, some people tend to appreciate it more.
When you improvise, you make connections in your mind, and you make connections with your audience. These are likely more valuable than a well done, pre-written text.
So, you should aim for imperfect improvisation, rather than for a perfect text, read from a prompter.
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