A French horn playing economist: how did learning an instrument help him think big?

We are just going to leave this here …

Arthur (Brooks, leading US economist and social scientist) was once asked whether he’d learned anything as a serious musician that applied to his current work (as a faculty member of the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School and author of 2 New York Bestseller books on economics).:

Number 1…is endless repetitions. It’s reps. It’s getting your reps. Again and again and again. Playing the same passage over and over and over again. Because, until you actually get the reps, you won’t have the ballistic movements in your brain. Which is to say, you won’t be able to bypass your prefrontal cortex in playing music. You need to do everything automatically. It’s just happening too fast. You won’t get technical perfection, otherwise. But that takes reps.

The second is slowing everything down. If you—when you are playing a classical instrument, and you are learning a piece of music, to make it such that it will sound great, flawlessly, over and over again, you need to play everything incredibly slowly—it’s the rule in classical music that you shouldn’t be able to recognize the music. If you can recognize the piece, you are playing it too quickly.

And the last is…an appreciation of failure. You are just going to fail a lot. You are going to fail a lot before you can succeed because the level of technical perfection is so demanding that there is just a lot of failure involved. Those are really the three things that have guided my ability to…be the president of the American Enterprise Institute.