Making room for the future

I see the present as an opportunity to shape the future. What I do today, will affect what I will be doing tomorrow, next month, next year, etc. My aim is to encourage and assist as many brass players along their musical journeys as is practical. I want you to succeed. And if you succeed, I do as well. This means we must let go of ideas, objects, habits, and such that are occupying space needed for future growth.

With this in mind, I will be discontinuing several products and strategies to make room for the innovative products of the future. The first will be our Mod Kits followed by our Gap Solution Kits. While these products are perfectly useful, and work very well, they must go to make room for the future. Some things were discontinued last year without notice. These include custom trumpet orders, the Summit One model, mouthpiece kit exchanges, most of our finger button inlay options, and long phone calls.

Here are a few things we could let go of in our trumpet playing:

• excessive mouthpiece pressure
  
• myths related to embouchure, aperture, pedagogy
  
• excessively shallow/small mouthpieces
  
• bias against musical genres other than our own preferences
  
• long tones
  
• judging others ability
  

These could be replaced with:

• Aperture Control
  
• knowledge, experience, and wisdom
  
• mouthpieces specifically designed to fit a genre while encouraging good tone
  
• exploring musical genres that we have never given a fair chance
  
• endurance, range, flexibility, beautiful tone, and love for playing again
  
• reaching out to others to help them succeed
  

These are just a few ideas based on observation of the trumpet community at large. There are many others, and I'm sure you can make your own list, but I challenge you to do so right now. Grab a notebook or post it note and write down three things you can remove from today to make room for tomorrow's growth.

Last Wednesday was the 10 year anniversary of a major stroke that nearly took my life. Some of you know that I lost my memory and my ability to read, write, speak, walk, and much more. This was one of dozens of related events that have shaped my life. Having strokes and heart attacks was a regular part of my life since I was a child. I was fortunate enough to undergo two heart surgeries last year that will likely reduce my risk significantly for many years.

The interesting part of this idea of letting go of habits, prejudices, and things today to make room for tomorrow is that this reality was forced upon me. Having had severe memory loss so many times throughout my lifetime, I have had to reinvent myself again and again. I learned decades ago to create one or two notebooks every year to document my goals, progress, projects, etc. When I re-learned how to read and write, I would review my life's work in these notebooks (I have boxes of them today), then make a plan to pick up where I left off. Every single time, I realized I had to let go of some unrealistic goals, habits, and objects to move forward.

This is the lesson some of you have already learned, and one that I share with you today. To make the most of today, you must recognize what is holding you back and make a conscious decision to leave those realities in your past starting now.

Feel free to share your thoughts and experiences with myself and your fellow readers in the comments.
Jason