Back in early 2020, I began working directly with the jazz music legend Chick Corea.
He had a home and studio locally and I had the mind-blowing privilege of spending most Friday nights with him.
It was like a spiritual experience every week.
Watching his fingers effortlessly float across the keyboard, producing the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard.
It was hard to believe I could enjoy such intimate access to this legend.
He would make me tea, I would watch and listen to him play, and we would discuss business and marketing strategies that would help expand his music and philosophy to the world.
He was one of the most humble people I’ve ever met, even though he had no need to be that way.
I mean, he was a 23-time Grammy award winner!
That puts him in the top 10 most Grammys won (he’s #6) in any career at the time of this writing.
This also makes him the top winning jazz musician of all time to date.
Even with all of those accomplishments, he still saw himself as ‘a work in progress’.
Work In Progress Mindset
Having this mindset – and keeping it – is the biggest lesson I learned from my time with Chick.
This idea of being a work in progress helps keep me focused on consistent improvement.
Every day I wake up, I make a plan to get a little bit better than I was yesterday.
I know that may sound challenging and it is–that’s the whole point!
How you define improvement though, depends on you and what you want to accomplish in business or in life.
Each of us will have different ways to measure improvement, and that’s fine.
The important thing is to choose what you want to improve and start measuring it.
Because in life, we are either improving and growing, or we are shrinking and succumbing, there is no in-between.
Start Implementing Now
So what does this mean? How do you start growing, learning, and improving your own abilities?
Well if you’re a business owner you’d read books, go to seminars, join a mastermind group or anything you can think of surrounding a particular subject.
But if you’re just starting out or trying to learn a new skill it’s easier to start on a gradient so you can still read books, do a course, and even use YouTube!
Either way, none of this is attainable if you don’t implement it!
It all starts with making the decision to do it, and that’s what Chick Corea was trying to show me.
No one can learn, grow, expand, or improve if they don’t actually want to themselves.
The business world isn’t the army where you have a sergeant who will yell at you for waking up late, you’re your own sergeant and soldier.
So the next time you see your business level off or you see something you want to learn, remember, you have the power to implement change in that situation.
