The Piano Pod Meets Ray Mak: Why perfectionism is a business killer!

19 Nov 2020 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

2:25

This content was created by The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. This content was uploaded by The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. This is a YouTube video titled "The Piano Pod Meets Ray Mak: Why perfectionism is a business killer!" (published 2020-11-19). The excerpt is a spoken monologue from the guest musician (likely Ray Mak) during an interview/talk produced by The Piano Pod. The speaker discusses perfectionism in musicianship and on YouTube — admitting to making mistakes, viewing criticism as a way to improve, advising against deleting posted videos (since content can gain traction later), and encouraging consistent posting despite imperfect performances.

Chapters

So I believe this thing, as musicians, okay, as musicians, usually we would like our thing to be perfect, okay? Like for example, when we play, but in YouTube, there's actually no perfection. There's no perfection. We are us, you know, we are humans, we make mistakes. I play a lot of mistakes because I can only listen and play, you know, so I make a lot of mistakes. But when we realize our mistake, it doesn't mean that other people will realize our mistake because we are like more professional, but other people may not realize unless there are other musicians that try to like, "Oh, penalize you. Oh, that part is not so good." But for me, I look at it, that kind of criticism as something that can build me. "Oh, maybe next time I can play better on that part." You know what I mean? Rather than, oh, I delete the video entirely, you know what I mean? So the more you post, the more you will get stumbled upon. So when people are clicking on YouTube, especially now during the lockdown, they'll be like scrolling and scrolling, and then they'll be like, oh, this video, it looks— I may want to look at it, or I may want to listen to it, you know. So when— but when we delete that is like totally no chance for them to even stumble upon us. So for example, when we post videos on YouTube, sometimes some songs are what we call the slow, slow bloomer. So we post, a week zero views, or maybe just one or two or three views, but then someone talk about that song 3 years later, you know what I mean? 3 years later, someone talk about that song and it bam, 1 million views, you know what I mean? But there are also some songs that you post, it's like 10,000 views and then no one watch it after that, you know what I mean? So it is a really subjective thing. When we post, we try not to remove our post because when we remove, that means there's zero chance for people to stumble upon us.