Kay:

Hey there, Questers welcome back, today is Thursday, August 12th and this is episode 419. Today we picked a quote from a mentor of one of our mentors. Victor Wooten is a Grammy Award-winning bassist and just happens to be a mentor of our mentor Joseph McClendon III.

Shi:

Victor tells us in this quote, “Never lose the groove in order to find a note.” I think as a mentor to our mentor, does that make this mentor-ception?

Kay:

A little bit of mentor-ception going on here.

Shi:

Or maybe meta mentors.

Kay:

I like the meta mentors we have going on for today’s podcast, but this quote from a bass guitarist, I think is so relevant and just in case that the quote, “Never lose the groove in order to find a note,” isn’t making sense to you let me put just a little bit of music theory behind this. So, when you’re jamming in a jazz session and you’ve got your bass guitar line going and you’re going [makes the sound of bass guitar playing] and you’ve got this groove going and it’s rocking and you go [makes the sound of bass guitar] and in that middle, you then stop in order to try and go back and figure it out but you’ve now lost the entire groove and your songs messed up.

Shi:

If you are not musically inclined, think about it when you’re speaking. Have you seen the person who just completely train wrecks themselves on a sentence where they could have just kept going, but instead they said “did” instead of “didn’t” and it still made sense the way that they said it, but they rewind themselves all the way back and they get flustered and they say, “I’m sorry? I meant ‘did’ and I said ‘didn’t’ and ha-ha” and now their confidence is shook. But what’s more, shook is the audience’s ability to stay in the moment and in the groove of what’s happening. I think that’s what Victor is really getting at here. So, whether it’s spoken word, whether it’s music played, whether it’s even the flow when you’re working on a big project or anything like that, remembering that the stumbles and the missteps are often easier to handle when you just keep going.

Kay:

Let’s take a flight 30,000 feet up in the air for just a quick moment and look down on this quote through the lens of life. If you are grooving along with your routine or, or let’s just say, you’ve been waking up early every day and you’ve been getting up at five and it feels so good and one morning you sleep in until eight accidentally or maybe on purpose and then you just completely toss your 5:00 AM habit out the window, because, well, I lost the note so what’s the point of finding the groove.

Shi:

Yeah. I have been there before, and I bet we all have if we can think about examples in our lives from different angles. I also think about whether the things that you let yourself rabbit hole on, what are the notes that you chase that might not necessarily be productive to the groove that you desire in your life? Is there some kind of petty vengeance that you chase at the expense of the groove of productivity or your positive optimistic success, or are there grudges that you hold? Are there things in your life that you let nitpick at you and you’ll chase them, or you’ll research them, or you’ll stay weirdly obsessed with them. A singular note that ends up ending the entire groove of what you’re going for. I think there’s a lot to be thought about here in this life sense that takes it off of the music pages and into the pages of our life.

Kay:

Well, one of the things that we know about life is that the more that you do particular actions in life, the more that they compound toward your success. If you’ve been a listener of the mentorship quest, then you’ve heard us say the very famous John Maxwell quote that “consistency compounds” and consistency of a groove means a compounding groove, which means over time, it’s going to get easier for you to not be losing notes along the way. So, keeping that consistency, uh, sometimes forsaking accuracy in the process in order to keep yourself consistent is the way that you have to go.

Shi:

You know another favorite quote of ours that I’m reminded of here, as we look at this quote is “done beats perfect” and sometimes when we’re trying to find that perfect thing, that perfect note for the melody, we can get stuck on it and we can just stay there and then we end up stalling our momentum and not being able to keep progress going. So, “done beats perfect” sometimes will help us if we’re working on something and we start obsessing about the order of the words or the formatting on the line, or the one way the script is flowing here when we know there’s still 85% of the script or the project or the thing that needs to get done. You can always say ‘let’s come back to that note, but let’s not lose our groove here in the process’, which is exactly what Victor Wooten is telling us in this quote, which is, “Never lose the groove in order to find a note.”

Kay:

Alrighty, guys, you’ve got a Groovy Quest for today. Today’s quest is really fun. We want you to put on your favorite song and groove. Take time, three minutes of a length of a song to move your body and dance along to the groove of the music. Don’t worry about perfection. Don’t lose the consistency of that dancing because it will make you feel better when you are done. Dancing is proven to increase your oxytocin and dopamine levels in your body so be sure you do it. Get out there, shake that groove thing, and don’t worry about the missed notes along the way. Are you ready? Sing it with us now.

Kay & Shi:

Let’s quest!