The Daily Musician
The Daily Musician is a podcast where musicians talk to musicians about what it really takes to grow—on and off the stage. Through honest conversations, we explore how artists practice, collaborate, think, and navigate the balance between creativity and real life. Whether you’re gigging, teaching, or just serious about your craft, this is your space to become a better musician—one conversation at a time.
The Daily Musician
Introduction and Progress vs. Perfection: A Kaizen Mindset
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Welcome to The Daily Musician.
In this first episode, Adam introduces the podcast and what listeners can expect—honest conversations about how musicians actually grow, practice, and improve over time. He and Grace then dives into a powerful idea that can change the way many musicians approach progress: the Kaizen mindset.
Instead of chasing perfection, this episode explores what it looks like to focus on small, consistent improvements—and why that approach leads to more sustainable growth.
If you’ve ever felt stuck or frustrated with your progress, this conversation offers a practical shift in perspective to help you move forward.
Download our Kaizen Club Booklet here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/18KUIY4VEc_79Zfc-8rhf-RT9o3fdo1sl/view?usp=sharing
Hello and welcome to episode one of the Daily Musician Podcast. We're so excited for you to be listening to this today. My name is Adam Wilson. I'm one of your hosts, and I'm joined by my amazing co-host Grace.
Speaker 2Hello.
Speaker 1We're uh we've been dreaming about this for a while, and so we're excited to be in the studio today, finally recording our first episode. I want to tell you a little bit about the podcast and kind of what you can expect, and then we want to talk about specifically the subject for today. But first we want to introduce ourselves. So my name is Adam, like I said, and I have been playing guitar for a really long time. I'm a guitar player. I started when I was 11 years old, and uh I love playing the guitar more than almost everything in the world. It's one of my favorite things to do. And um I also am the owner of Learn Music in Cornelius, so we have the opportunity to teach over 500 or almost 500 students a week how to be great musicians. We love what we do. We do that through private lessons and playing in rock bands. And I also am um like a working musician. So I'm in a band with some of my friends and we play around town. I'm a songwriter as well. And so, you know, the the Daily Musician podcast is something I'm really excited about and just yeah, really happy to be here. Grace, why don't you go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 2Sure. So I started learning music when I was 11 as well. Um, I I dabbled in voice, piano, guitar. Um, and then I ended up studying music business with a focus on voice in college. So currently I I teach voice and piano lessons here at Learn Music, um, and I have over 30 students a week. And I still gig and perform locally as as my schedule allows, um, but always hoping to do that more.
Speaker 1Awesome. Well, we want to tell you a little bit, like I said, about what this podcast is gonna be about. So the Daily Musician Podcast is a podcast about musicians becoming better musicians. It's not about fame, it's not about hacks, and it's not about overnight success. What the podcast is is musicians talking to musicians and having candid conversations about thinking, working, and growing like a musician. So the topic of this first episode is gonna be progress versus perfection and having a kaizen mindset. We're gonna unpack the kaizen thing a little more, but Grace and I both really care about this topic of progress over perfection or progress versus perfection, because what we've seen is that perfectionism can quietly derail musicians. And we um have have witnessed that over the years. You know, sometimes when uh students start learning music, they can put so much pressure on themselves to be perfect. And really, we want people to be able to enjoy the journey of being a musician. And a lot of times when people put too much pressure on themselves, they set unrealistic expectations or goals for themselves and then get super bummed out when things don't unfold like they want them to. And at our music school, we have a lens that we look at progress through, or that uh we we have a way that we don't fall into the perfectionism trap and we focus on progress, and that's a kaizen mindset. So the word kaizen explained simply is small continuous improvements over time. And this matters for musicians because music is cumulative, and that's a fun word, cumulative. Music is cumulative, and skills compound quietly over time. And Grace and I have both talked about Kaizen a lot. It's something we talk about every day at the studio, and it's something that we've both like have learned about over the years and applied in what we do at Learn Music and in our own life as musicians. So, Grace, why don't you tell us a little bit about your experience with the Kaizen concept and how that's been valuable for you just as a musician and a person?
Speaker 2So I know for me, I I'm a huge perfectionist. Uh, you probably know that about me, Adam. Um, and that's held me back a lot in the past um as a musician and just in other areas of life too. But the Kaizen mindset of of progress over perfection has it's been incredibly helpful. I know it's it's something that I think I realized in in college and high school, but I didn't really have a name for it till I got here. Um, and you started talking about the Kaizen mindset. And yeah, I just love other musicians who who struggle with similar obstacles to have have a way to work through them.
Speaker 1Yeah, and Kaizen is something that I learned about when I was younger, I was like 18, I worked at Trader Joe's, and they talk about Kaizen a lot at Trader Joe's, and the way that it was explained to me uh back then was when you show up to work each day, you want to grow by one inch. And you know, after a week, you're you've grown by seven inches, and then you know, it's over a foot after two weeks. And the thought is like when you get a little bit better each day, each day you're only getting a little bit better. But over time, that's cumulative and you're you're growing consistently, and that adds up. I think of the concept of like compound interest with investing. It's like, you know, as time goes on, your interest in your investments compounds more and more. And that's kind of like with Kaizen. It's like maybe you feel like you're growing slowly at first, but when you're consistent over time, you grow a lot. And I think specifically the way that I've incorporated that into my life is I I am a perfectionist as well, but sometimes the things that I want to do are so disconnected from reality. And so every year I do this growth plan, and I'll, you know, 10 years ago when I first started doing it, it's like, I want to run a marathon and I want to read 470 books. And um, and it was just like, you know, really, really big goals. And year after year, I was realizing that there was a pattern, and it's that I wasn't achieving my goals. And so I remembered the Trader Joe days and just kind of thought, you know, if I have smaller goals each year, but I'm consistent in meeting those goals, you know, at the end of two or three years, I'll have made a ton of progress instead of failing three years in a row. And I've I've found success in that, and then I've applied that um musically, which we can talk more about, but it's it the Kaizen mindset has really shaped who I am as a musician. And I have two kids, I have three kids, um, but two of them are one of them I don't care about. I have I the reason I said two is I have two kids in music lessons, and um and I've watched them do the Kaizen Club, which we'll talk about at Learn that that we do at Learn Music, and that watching them practice just a little bit each day and then build on that on that amount of time each day really kind of changed my practice habits. So Kaizen's been been really big for me.
Speaker 2Shout out to Trader Joe's, yeah.
Speaker 1Shout out to Trader Joe's, so many good things.
Speaker 2Yeah, I feel like it kind of goes the other way too.
Speaker 1So I thought you were gonna talk about like the like compared to Trader Joe's.
Speaker 2Yeah, compared to Trader Joe's. Yeah, no, it goes the other way too, where some sometimes it's not like the the I have to practice so so much to get to where I want to go. It's you won't practice because your practicing isn't perfect yet. Like you you're not allowing yourself to make mistakes and to work through it. Um that's something I see with my students a lot and with myself, yeah where I just have to remind myself that that improving I I'm gonna put this in vocal terms because I'm mostly a vocalist. Improving the voice, like developing smooth transitions between chest voice and head voice, or or expanding your range so you can sing higher notes, there's no like instant fix for it. Like your practice is gonna be really messy for a while. It's not gonna sound good, and that's okay. Um and I feel like it can be really discouraging if you just um don't understand that that it takes time. Um I like to use an analogy with my students, like it's it's like going to the gym to work out a muscle. If you go, if you show up to the gym every few weeks and you like target your biceps for for five minutes, um, nothing's gonna change. Um and you shouldn't expect it to, um, because it takes consistent effort to grow muscle, and it's the same with with the voice and and all music skills, really.
Speaker 1So yeah. I hadn't really thought about it like that before. I think that's really interesting. It's like sometimes we don't allow ourselves to practice because we don't want to make the mistake.
Speaker 2Yeah, I see that with my students so much.
Speaker 1Yeah, I see that with myself, and I think it's really important as educators and just as musicians that we normalize making mistakes. So a framework that I use for my students, and and I've never really thought about it this way, but hopefully this is a tool that that they can use and that we can use to normalize making mistakes. It's not if you're gonna make a mistake, it's when you're gonna make a mistake or when you're gonna have a hard time doing something. So we know that that's gonna happen. We just have to assume that that's gonna happen. And the way that we approach it is we just say, what am I doing wrong? And how do I fix it? And I feel like what happens when we do that is we take the, we take ourselves out of the equation to some extent. It's not, oh, I'm I'm such a bad guitar player, I'm such a bad vocalist or, oh, I can't get this right. We flip that, we reframe it, and it's okay, everyone makes mistakes. This is literally a part of the process. Sometimes you know what to do by not knowing or by knowing what not to do. I want to say that again because that was really good. So sometimes you know what to do from knowing what not to do. Yeah. And so when we when we can normalize making mistakes and we can approach it like in a very logical way that takes our worth, our self-worth out of it, we become so much more effective at practice.
Speaker 2Yeah, and it's kind of like the mistake becomes part of your tool set almost. Like something that you're not gonna pull out of the tool set again, but it's there, so you you know what not to do. Yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah. I'm gonna butcher this, so I don't even really know why I'm gonna say it, but there's that I think it was like Thomas Edison or something. It took him like a thousand tries.
Speaker 2The light bulb.
Speaker 1The light bulb. And he's like, they're like, How do you feel about failing a thousand times or whatever? And he's like, I just now I know like 999 things that don't work. That's great. I don't know. I feel like we're onto something here, like there's almost a humility that we have to have as musicians that it's like we just understand that making a mistake is part of the process, or making lots of mistakes is, and that's a key that unlocks further levels of musicianship for us.
Speaker 2Absolutely. Not to get us even further off track, but that made me think of improv. I had this experience in college where I was in an old time band and I was playing upright bass, and our a lot of old time is just improving off of a short melody. And our our teacher would have us go around and just improv something, and I would always request to be skipped because I was afraid of making a mistake. Um, and yeah, now that I think about it, I should have taken that opportunity and just like messed up a ton until I got good at it. Yeah.
Speaker 1Totally. Well, I think too, like we talk about feedback at Learn Music a lot, and I think we operate in a in a private lesson context a lot. So I'm even thinking about like it's a gift to be able to make a mistake in front of an instructor who can show you the right way to do it.
Speaker 2That's so true.
Speaker 1And so I think that even, you know, at Learn Music, like that's something that we want to do for our students is like, no, if you like try to make all the mistakes here so I can give you feedback and help you figure out how to overcome these things. So yeah, that's really good.
Speaker 2What are some ways that some really practical ways that we as musicians can apply the Kaizen mindset to what we do?
Speaker 1Yeah, that's a that's a great idea. I think I honestly think, and this is it's kind of a shameless plug, but it's a shameless plug because it's good. I think the way that we've structured the Kaizen Club at Learn Music is a really great way to do that. So um something that we talk about at Learn Music is uh a verse in the Bible. It says, where there's no vision, the people perish. And so in order to kaizen, you have to have a vision for how you're gonna kaizen, right? So what we've done for our students is we've set very small achievable goals. So I think what is it for like ages five through eight, it's like it's like five minutes a day, three days a week. Yeah, really, you know, it's like very, very small. And a lot of this is informed by the book Atomic Habits. You know, that's a great resource if he talks about kaizen in that book. But um, and then you build from there. So have some sort of um plan, I would say is is one great way that you can Kaizen. And we're we can put we'll put the um PDF link in like the show notes or whatever for our Kaizen Club thing. And um, our Kaizen Club is that we're so high tech here. I we just call it Archisen Club thing for our our expertly designed by Grace Kaizen Club PDF, so that you can use that as as a framework for maybe doing your thing .
Speaker 2Yeah, it's geared towards towards um 18 and under right now, but it can totally be modified to adults.
Speaker 1Maybe we'll make a oh yeah, yeah, an adult one too. Yeah, so another thing that is really helpful for me that I've been a practice that I've been doing lately is keeping a practice journal. And I think um so what I do is when I practice each day, I don't do it every day, I need to be better about it, but I write down what I practiced, and I think it doesn't help me kai-sen as much as it helps me want to continue kaizen-ing, if that makes sense, because I can see the progress I've made. Definitely. So when I go back to the first day of my journal versus where I am now, I'm able to see kind of the progress that I've made. So I would say having a plan to answer your question is is the first thing. And then keeping a journal will help continue to motivate you along the process.
Speaker 2For sure. Love that.
Speaker 1Um so Grace, what do you feel like in our conversation today? What do you feel like some of the the key things that we've taken away are?
Speaker 2I think one of the big ones for me that I'm gonna I'm actually gonna take away from this conversation is is the mistake thing that we literally just talked about. It's learning music is messy and you're not gonna you're not gonna pick up an instrument and just be great immediately. I mean some people do, but they're the anomalies. Yeah and and it takes it takes time. It's gonna be messy and it takes time. And the musicians who who get where they are, um, they improve by showing up imperfectly often.
Speaker 1That's so good. Yeah. Amen, Sister Grace. Yeah, I want to highlight what Grace just said again. The the reality is is we see so we see so like if you're on YouTube, I know my YouTube algorithm is like, you know, learn learn this scale to, you know, dominate all guitar things. And it's like you see all these all these things that people are trying to sell you, and then you also see uh that that promise you like if you just hey, if you just learn this one thing, you'll become a great musician. Or you see all these amazing players on Instagram or singers on Instagram that just kind of make you want to quit your instrument and uh make you feel like you're not making any progress. So I think you know it's really important to realize that there is no shortcut. It takes 10 years to become an overnight success. And it's exactly what Grace said that the people who are the best at music showed up imperfectly, but they showed up imperfectly often. But yeah, I think I think that that's really good. I think that kind of the precursor to that is my takeaway, which is something that you said about you know, being so scared. Well that what do they call it? Like paralysis analysis or analysis paralysis, like being so scared that you you're gonna make a mistake, that you never do the thing. And I s I see that a lot, you know, and I think that you know, whether it's in music or in business, I see people who have so much potential or who have great ideas that are so scared to take the risk or to be vulnerable. And so I think just kind of being black or white about it, like just know like being vulnerable and making mistakes is part of the price you have to pay to become a great musician. And so I think the more we can normalize that stuff, the better.
Speaker 2Yeah. Well, thank you so much for listening today. Um, we really appreciate you tuning in. Our our next podcast, we're gonna talk about practice. What is practice and how should we approach practice as musicians? If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and share with another musician or leave us a five-star review.
Speaker 1Thank you so much, everyone, for joining us today for episode one of the Daily Musician Podcast, where we're helping musicians become better musicians one conversation at a time. See you in the next episode.