{"id":3018,"date":"2011-11-17T06:55:54","date_gmt":"2011-11-17T11:55:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/2011\/11\/exception-to-the-standard\/"},"modified":"2011-11-17T06:55:54","modified_gmt":"2011-11-17T11:55:54","slug":"exception-to-the-standard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/2011\/11\/exception-to-the-standard\/","title":{"rendered":"Exception to the Standard"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just wanted to share a spot-on excerpt from todays blog post by marketing guru <a href=\"http:\/\/sethgodin.typepad.com\/\" target=\"_self\">Seth Godin<\/a>.&#0160; As usual, he&#39;s made the distinction between what we may tell ourselves (as artists or otherwise) and what it is we really need to keep in mind:<\/p>\n<p><em>The other day, after a talk to some graduate students at the Julliard  School, one asked, &quot;In The Dip, you talk about the advantage  of mastery vs. being a mediocre jack of all trades. So does it make  sense for me to continue focusing on mastering the violin?&quot;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Without fear of error, I think it&#39;s easy to say that this woman will  never become the best violinist in the world. That&#39;s because it&#39;s  essentially impossible to be the one and only best violinist in the  world. There might be 5,000 or 10,000 people who are so technically good  at it as to be indistinguishable to all but a handful of orchestra  listeners. This is true for many competitive fields&#8211;we might want to  fool ourselves into thinking that we have become the one and only best  at a technical skill, but it&#39;s extremely unlikely.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>The quest for technical best is a form of hiding. You can hide from  the marketplace because you&#39;re still practicing your technique. And you  can hide from the hard work of real art and real connection because you  decide that success lies in being the best technically, at getting a 99  instead of a 98 on an exam.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>What we can become the best at is being an idiosyncratic  exception to the standard. Joshua Bell is often mentioned (when  violinists are mentioned at all) not because he is technically better  than every other violinst, but because of his charisma and willingness  to cross categories. He&#39;s the best in the world at being Josh Bell, not  the best in the world at playing the violin.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just wanted to share a spot-on excerpt from todays blog post by marketing guru Seth Godin.&#0160; As usual, he&#39;s made the distinction between what we may tell ourselves (as artists or otherwise) and what it is we really need to keep in mind: The other day, after a talk to some graduate students at the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4,5,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-nature","category-new-paltz-ny","category-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3018\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}