[MUSIC PLAYING]
You may think, why am I filming a course on entrepreneurship
with a stage as a backdrop?
In many ways, there are so many commonalities
between a performer and musician and the act of being an entrepreneur.
You think about the whole process of learning how to play music,
it starts with the active listening.
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 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 this,
because a musician might think, oh, if only I can get the instrument
to perform the way I want it to.
That's my craft.
Or an engineer might think, if only I could 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 fill 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 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 that's a trumpet, a guitar, a 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 my-- 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 in your team learn,
OK, this person admits they made a mistake.
But then also being able to say 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's 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-- and 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
onto new challenges and new problems, so that you're
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, you know?
I think it's something you make time for.
Twyla Tharp talks about it, and 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 entrepreneurship.
Maybe it's not a coincidence that even some of the world's biggest companies,
like Apple and Microsoft, were 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 to challenge you to see how you can
apply these lessons, and these findings, and 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.