How a person approaches music is how they approach everything else in life.
Students often equate success with a perfect score. However, the goal of learning is not to be the best, but to be better than you were yesterday. This is especially pertinent to music because it cannot be mastered in a short amount of time. It takes dedication, persistence, and deep thought. How one plays will not be perfect the first time, but with focused practice, deliberate cognition and the simple act of knowing one's abilities, one can achieve more than they thought was possible.
To me, music is very much like a sport. There are those that we see in the media that are truly transcendent and special at what they do. As good as those individuals are at their craft, be it putting a 624 gram ball made of leather into an 18 inch diameter hoop 10 feet off the ground, or moving a stick with some horse hair attached to it across a hollow wooden box with 4 strings, when they participate as a group, they can not be the only people that contribute. Everyone contributes equally in the group and every person is important to the end result.
Also, to become better at a sport, an athlete practices with a goal in mind, always searching for a more efficient way to complete a motion. A musician is also searching for a better motion to create the kind of sound they strive to produce. These things lend to each other and then to life, because we all are looking for ways to complete daily tasks with the same goals in mind.
Every student is capable of producing music. There are so many levels of capability and as a teacher, my goal is to foster growth so that each individual can show improvement and advancement as a musician.
Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.
-Lao Tzu
-Lao Tzu