Keeping An Amateur’s Mindset While Becoming A Pro (Newsletter 05)

The man that knows something knows that he knows nothing at all” – Erykah Badu

I remember being a kid, about 7 or 8 years old, without a worry in the world. It was the weekend, which meant it was time to walk to my neighbours' house and have fun with their family computer in a new-to-me program called “Cool Edit Pro”.

—Cool Edit Pro was an early version of what has become Adobe Audition.

We'd record guitar and vocals through the gooseneck microphone attached to the desktop computer. We'd run a cheap electric keyboard into a 1/4″ jack on the back—yes the computer has a 1/4″ jack!

My favourite part, at the time, was listening back to our records with a great sense of accomplishment.

But my perspective has changed, looking back. As a pro audio engineer for the last decade, my current experience has somewhat morphed my memory of the past. The best part, I believe, was simply flowing with the experience and having fun as a complete amateur.

Lately, I’ve been filling my time by learning a variety of new skills:

• Video editing (with Premiere Pro)
• Graphic design (with Illustrator)
• Productivity/management (with Notion)

…to name a few.

I feel like a total beginner, which is a great feeling, even with the stints of overwhelm.

This feeling inspired me to write this newsletter. I hope this, in turn, inspires you to keep what I call an “amateur mindset” when it comes to your music, art, work and life.

I've been developing this idea and practice and will continue doing so. I wanted to write to you today to share where I've gotten thus far.

If you’re actually an amateur in music production, good. This newsletter will provide an argument that that’s a great (albeit momentary) place to be.

If you’re more experienced, it’s my goal to offer a fresh perspective that will help you continue moving forward with your art and music.

This is a long one, so I'll share Part 1 (the big idea) today and Part 2 (the practical steps) tomorrow. Let’s get into it.

The Amateur Mindset

We'll begin by defining the word ‘amateur’.

1. ‘a person who engages in a study, sport, or other activity for pleasure rather than for financial benefit or professional reasons’.

The exchange of money for a service often (though not always), by necessity, restricts creative freedom. It has to inorder for the service to match the needs of the market.

Don’t get me wrong, earning money is important. There’s also a lot of creativity in entrepreneurship. I earn a living as an audio engineer and have to act creatively all the time. However, there are many instances where I’m simply going through the motions to get my work done effectively.

2. ‘a person inexperienced or unskilled in a particular activity’.

Learning the fundamentals is paramount in any field if we want to gain skill and expertise. I talk about this all the time.

There's a silver lining to starting off with limited skill. You can learn the fundamentals and tie them into your existing knowledge of other subjects for a unique perspective. Connect the dots with whatever you already know.

The potential for skill and experience acquisition is infinite, and this is particularly exciting for a beginner.

3. ‘a person who admires something’.

Growing up in a bilingual region of Canada (and being 1/4 French, by heritage), I learned French early on in life. This definition always stuck with me.

Why would someone do something as an unpaid hobby?

Why would someone work to overcome inexperience and a lack of skills?

It’s because we have a fascination or admiration for what we’re learning. The pleasure we gain from learning about our interests is programmed into our psyche.

Interest is both a psychological state characterized by increased attention, effort, and affect, experienced in a particular moment (situational interest), as well as an enduring predisposition to reengage with a particular object or topic over time (from individual interest).

So then, the amateur's mindset is one that emphasizes the inherent value of work and art, keeps an open mind to the endless possibilities, and does so out of love for the work and art.

That sounds like a pretty great place to be, doesn't it?

For The Love Of Music

Keeping an amateur's mindset means maintaining a sense of interest, fascination and wonder. It's about tapping into the inherent value of music (in this case) and exploring your genuine curiosities that make life worth living.

It's not about learning what you “need” to know to make a living. I've worked with jaded professionals and have discerned that I do not want to be like them.

It's not about staying an amateur, either. I've had plenty of friends and acquaintances dabble in music but never really create the art they wanted.

With an amateur's mindset, we're working efficiently to develop our skills, knowledge and tastes, but doing so from a place of true love and curiosity.

The idea of the “beginner's mind” sparked my inspiration for this practice. I put my own spin on it because of this definition of “amateur” (a person who admires something).

Unlimited Potential From The Beginner’s Viewpoint

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few” – Shunryu Suzuki

I'm no Zen master (in fact, I'm still a beginner with zazen meditation). But whether we practice or not, this is a great quote.

We naturally want to become experts in our interests. Becoming “experts” or “specialists” is also encouraged, in some part, by our culture. It's the whole go-to-school-to-get-a-job deal.

If you've been in a specialized job, a specific routine, a hobby, or even a relationship for long enough, you've probably felt that there wasn't much else to learn or much room to grow.

This plateau can be shown in a visualization of the “learning curve”. The S-curve or Sigmoid function (pictured below) generalizes a typical learning curve:

We see experience on the X-axis and learning on the Y-axis.

We often struggle to get started as we learn the fundamentals and learn what to learn, to even begin with.

We then get a hold of the fundamentals and cover a lot of ground in relatively little time.

Then, we approach a plateau where learning tapers off, even as we gain more and more experience.

If we're not careful, this feeling of hitting a plateau of knowledge and skill can lead to boredom, a robotic work style, a know-it-all attitude, and many other unwanted traits and feelings.

Developing a beginner's mind (which is a big part of the amateur mindset) doesn't mean forgetting the knowledge and skills you've developed up to this point. Rather, it means cultivating your sense of curiosity and open-mindedness to continue learning.

It's about embracing a state of openness to new possibilities without allowing past experiences to control your actions and reactions.

Learning = Creativity

This is something I repeat often, as a reminder to you and also to myself.

Exploring the unknown and ‘connecting the dots' between novel and internalized knowledge/experience is how we learn.

It's also by connecting these proverbial ‘dots' that we are able to create the art we want to create.

The brain increases dopamine as we’re exposed to novel information that we actually find interesting. This is true whether the experience (what we’re learning) shares some commonality with what we already know from past experiences or whether the experience is more distinct and isolated from what we already know (source).

Why are humans such a successful species, from an evolutionary perspective?

It’s not that we’re fast. It’s not that we’re strong. We can’t swim very well. We can’t fly. We take forever to fully develop (decades).

We're successful because of our complex brains.

We’ve evolved to learn incredibly complex ideas and to create what is necessary to not only survive but thrive in the world we create for ourselves.

By understanding the inherent value of their ‘hobbies', amateurs continuously seek out learning. This accumulation of skills and knowledge in one passion is combined with skills and knowledge in seemingly separate fields of study. This produces novel perspectives and creative work.

The two best ways I know to learn are to ask questions and to gain experience through experimentation.

Asking aspiring questions leads to inspiring answers.

• Aspire means “to have a strong desire to achieve or become something.”
• Inspire can mean “to encourage someone,” “to elicit a particular feeling or emotion in someone,” or “to give someone an idea for something.”

I try to ask questions to masters and beginners alike. There's usually something to glean from their answers.

Learning an art means doing that art.

• What we hear, we forget.
• What we see, we remember.
• What we do, we know.

So dive in, as an “amateur”. Get your hands dirty, experiment, and make mistakes.

As an additional point, you'll have the added benefit of learning your limitations.

Limitations and constraints actually enhance your creativity.  We must act creatively to “work with what we've got” to make the most beautiful art we can.

The Flow State

“Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act.” ― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Before I even knew what the “flow state” was (or even what an XLR cable was), music production brought me into the flow state.

To me, it's the perfect amount of challenge to think up a musical idea in my mind and execute it in a digital audio workstation.

It engages the right and left hemispheres of the brain, and at the end of it, I have a piece of recorded music to sit back and enjoy.

The trick to flow is to do something challenging but achievable.

If the challenge is too high, we become anxious. If the challenge is too low, we become bored. In either extreme, our creativity and music suffer.

This can be visualized in the graphic below, with skill level on the X-axis and challenge level on the Y-axis:

Let's take the example of music production. We build up our foundational knowledge and then challenge ourselves withactually creating music.

Once we know the basics of producing (notably recording and mixing), we know that producing music is achievable.

The challenge, then, can be anything we'd like. There are infinite examples of goals here, and setting a goal is a creative exercise in and of itself. Here are but a few examples:

• To produce the best-sounding music you can possibly create
• To produce the worst-sounding music you've ever created
• To use a specific advanced technique
• To write with a specific music theory concept
• To produce without the use of certain tools or techniques

By keeping an amateur's mindset, we can develop skills (to be confident that the task is achievable). At the same time, we're aware that there is always something new to learn and experience (to have a challenge). We can channel that into our work and achieve a state of flow while doing so.

Exercises For Developing An Amateur's Mindset

We've discussed the big-picture ideas of the amateur's mindset. Now I want to share a few exercises for developing an amateur's mindset.

As always, I invite you to try these out for yourself. Take what works for you and leave the rest! 

Learn The Fundamentals First

A lot of people tell me the fundamentals are boring.

I couldn't disagree more.

There's a special feeling you get when the fundamentals start to click as you learn something.

You can get that same feeling by connecting more advanced concepts to those same fundamentals.

In music production and other arts, we gain experience as we practice the fundamentals. It’s about experiential learningand practice, not about studying fundamentals in a textbook.

This is the fun part of any field of study and we can always return to the fundamentals at any point in our journey.

Return To The Fundamentals Regularly

As you evolve in skill and knowledge, make a habit of returning to study the fundamentals.

You'll evolve as a technician and artist.

The tactics will change with the times.

Through it all, the fundamentals will remain permanent.

I put together what I consider a “fundamentals course” on the tools of mixing in my Mixing With Series Crash Course. It's a great resource if you want to learn the ins and outs of your mixing tools!

Practice Mindfulness

Mindfulness is about paying attention to the present moment without judgment. This isn’t necessarily about meditation, though meditation is an obvious mindfulness practice.

The amateur mindset is about practicing your art for the love of the art itself. Getting into a state of flow where you become one with the present moment and your music is one of the most rewarding experiences in the world.

This is easier said than done, and sometimes won’t come at all during a production session. It’s one of those things that tends to elude us the harder we try, making it difficult to recreate. But keeping mindfulness in mind as we go about our music (and lives more generally) can help to get us there.

Ask Aspirational Questions

How many times have you become obsessed with learning a new topic, taking to the Internet to search for answers online? (Maybe that’s how you found me).

Our inquisitive nature as humans leads us to seek answers to our problems and interests.

The quality of our answers comes from the quality of our questions.

An amateur who knows the fundamentals has the ability to ask more specific and directed questions about the technical aspects and the conceptual ideas of his craft.

Don’t take your current knowledge for granted and fall into the trap of believing you know what you need. There's always more to learn and experience that will benefit your music and life.

Ask questions to your peers, to masters of your craft, and to beginners alike. You’ll find inspirational answers if you look for them.

Take Notes/Connect The Dots

“Paper is to write things down that we need to remember. Our brains are used to think.” ― Albert Einstein

Our brains are great for having ideas, but we often struggle to hold ideas in our minds with any sense of clarity.

It’s critical that we write down our ideas to organize our thoughts. This is a simple system for managing psychic entropy (the inner chaos, distraction, and scatteredness of the mind).

I owe a good majority of the success in my life to writing, mostly for this reason.

Take notes and connect the dots. I use a modified version of the Cornell note-taking system with ‘notes', ‘cue', and ‘summarize' sections. I added a ‘connect the dots' section where I can link to other resources.

The Notes section is where I write down the ideas, arguments and facts from the content.

The Cue section is where I write down my own questions, insights and action steps as I work through the content.

The Summarize section is where I write out the big idea(s) from the content.

The Connect The Dots section is where I make the connection between the content at hand and how it relates to other ideas I have or have heard.

I do this for almost every chapter of every book or article I read, every lecture, podcast or audiobook I listen to, or instructional video I watch.

It takes a lot of extra time, and I prefer it that way for three main reasons:

1. it allows me to focus on and remember what I'm learning.
2. it makes me more discerning of what content I choose to consume.
3. it keeps my ‘information diet' lean and helps with overconsumption (that's an idea for another newsletter).

The amateur or hobbyist is often restricted in the resources she can apply toward her passion projects (notably time). However, in the time spent away from her craft, the mind can make connections between her art and the rest of her day-to-day experience.

Taking notes clarifies our thinking and allows us to make these connections more easily!

Set Aside Preconceptions

As you develop your skills, knowledge and beliefs around a subject, challenge yourself to set them all aside as you engage in that subject.

Try approaching your music production (or any other art/work) as if it’s completely new to you. This simple yet difficult practice will open your mind to question the way you do things and whether other ways may interest you and benefit your art.

Embrace Learning Opportunities

Much like the amateur, the pro has much to learn. We all do.

Learning opportunities are abundant.

• Ask people questions
• Experiment with things that interest you
• Read books
• Read posts online (you can check out my website at foxmusicproduction.com)
• Watch videos and tutorials (you can check out my YouTube channel)

Take time to learn about anything and everything you're interested in. If necessary, make a game out of stuff you're disinterested in (and learn from that, too).

Develop Other Hobbies

The best way to develop the amateur mindset is to be an amateur.

I’ve been interested in entrepreneurship for a while and have had the phrase “niche down” repeated to me more times than I can count.

When I was studying at university, the goal was to specialize in a certain discipline and subdiscipline of engineering (I chose civil engineering).

After going down that path for a good while and feeling unfulfilled with my increasingly repetitive work, I started questioning it.

It seems, to me at least, that we naturally have multiple interests. To keep things interesting in our lives, it’s important to pursue what we’re inherently curious about.

By the way, with the rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence, I believe that a good percentage of specialized jobs will eventually be replaced. It’s my opinion, then, that gaining more generalized knowledge of the world is the path forward.

Rest Properly

I recently became aware of the Default Mode Network of the brain.

I’m learning more about it and will share my findings with you as I gain more clarity.

But basically, this brain network activates when a person is not focused on the outside world and is in a wakeful, but rested state. Think of daydreaming or allowing your mind to wander without a clear task to focus on.

I'm learning that this network helps tremendously in processing information to form memories and imagine the future. These are both necessary for internalizing our learning and both contribute to creativity.

I'm admittedly a beginner in the realm of neuroscience, but it's fascinating nonetheless (see, I'm practicing being an amateur!). By the way, if you have any resources for me to check out on the topic of neuroscience, please send them my way!

Seek Feedback

A major part of the flow state is having immediate feedback. Music is such a popular flow-inducing activity for this reason. You can immediately hear and feel how you're doing by the sound you're hearing.

This is true of music production as well when you're recording, arranging, mixing, and more.

Beyond the immediate feedback of the moment. Seek additional feedback on your work from professionals, amateurs, and non-players alike.

Put your work out there (the Internet allows you to show your work to an audience without needing to be “pro” enough for a distribution deal). No record label, art exhibit, etc. needed!

Recap

Alright, so that's my current take on ‘keeping an amateur's mindset'. As I wrote, this idea is still being shaped in my mind (as all ideas are), but I wanted to share it with you now.

If you have anything to add, please do not hesitate to reply! I'm always interested in hearing your insights and opinions.

‘Til next week.

Cheers,

-Art

PS: I've always wanted to start a “curation newsletter” where I share what's been on my radar throughout the week. Here's version 1, where I'll share an artist I've been listening to, a book I've been reading, and a quote I've been pondering.

You can look forward to what I'm coining ‘the Curation Station' at the end of my weekly newsletter 🙂