The driving idea behind “The Perpetual Beginner” is that everyone can learn to play well, but that many people struggle and don’t fully understand the reasons why.
This can lead to frustration, stagnation, and a nagging sense that you just “don’t have it”. But whether you have “it” or not, you can play better than you do today when you approach your work with the right mindset and a conscious practice method.
Skilled players get stuck in ruts too, but experienced musicians know how to work through their problems in order to move forward.
The Perpetual Beginner Project is a collaborative look at how this happens for all of us: the process of identifying challenges, finding solutions, and doing the work to make it happen. Underlying all of this is the need to feed the love, to stimulate the desire and excitement that made you want to play in the first place.
To participate in the PB Project, start documenting your progress on video. I’ve started a Facebook group also called The Perpetual Beginner to give us a platform to post these videos and have conversations about them. Most of all, the idea is to put the ideas in the book into action: recognizing mental, technical, and psychic “blocks”, and finding a way past them.
I’ll be posting practice videos of my own as well. My goal is to share my own process in real time as I work through the music, demonstrating how I go about solving problems and (hopefully) showing clear improvement as I do. As much as I may have learned about music over the years, there will always be new things to explore and old things to improve. My hope is that by sharing these things with each other and having conversations about them, we will all be both inspired and elevated as we continue the never-ending process of becoming a better musician.
I’m on the final chapter of The Perpetual Beginner. It’s a valuable, well-written book for musicians of all levels brought to full life by your personal stories.
I decided to purchase the book after watching the fine video on your creative, personal take on Blue Monk and the treasure trove of jazz-blues possibilities that grow from this unique tune. As a “perpetual beginner” intermediate player who plays weekly in a jazz-blues trio in a small restaurant, I look forward to more such lessons. Thanks for all that you’re doing.