My name is Jaena Kim, currently 23 years old and I am currently home at Winnipeg, Manitoba, that’s where I grew up. I just came back from Banff, Alberta, which is also in Canada, working at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Due to COVID right now, though, the center is closed, but it was an arts and leadership development institution. And so I worked at arts administration, which was a fitting fit after I graduated from the University of Montreal and McGill University in flute performance. And I also minored in music entrepreneurship.

I was lucky enough early on to meet a very renowned flutist. Her name is Jeanne Baxtresser. She’s kind of the goddess of orchestral flute excerpts that you play for auditions. She gave me this piece of advice, where she said, “Always find someone better than you, and then go up to them and ask to play with them.” And I think, especially as musicians who are nurtured from a young age to be the very best, it can also kind of interfere with building good relationships with your peers, or with musicians who are better than you because there will always be someone better than you. I can tell you that right now. I guess hearing that from a young age actually kind of like broke that barrier for me a little bit. I guess no longer did I see them as competition, but I saw them as opportunities to learn. And so where else are you going to find the most talented musicians? Well, you’re gonna find them at competitions because those are the ones that know that competitions, especially in 2020, you need to win major competitions to have a solo career. Like that is a very harsh, but real, reality. And so I think my parents and my teachers recognized that and put me through a lot of competitions. And so why I think they are so essential to you as a musician is, not only do you need them to build a successful career, but now it’s like, I want everybody to see them as learning opportunities. You see people perform, like you see people better than you, and you have opportunities to connect with them actually, like through competition, so it’s not like you’re segregated by a wall the entire time. You can interact, you’re often in the same waiting room together. They’re often small cocktail parties for the competitors to meet beforehand. And I really use those moments to network, like network, network, network. And some of them I call my closest genuine friends, and some of them have taught me maybe techniques that I was struggling with, and some have even encouraged me to do better things with my career. And so to me, competitions was not so much the competing aspect, or enrolling in the competition, but it was more that I was going to meet people who are better than me and I was going to take advantage of that and get to know them.

I think the more good events you have surrounding something that you do, the more it encourages you and the more it encourages you to do it, because now not only are you extrinsically motivated, you’re intrinsically motivated.

[To see more of Jaena’s views, explore our Career Conversations feature Power of arts in connecting people.]

Quint Smits, Longitude fellow, Tilburg University:

Many of us try to learn from others who are ahead of us and have developed expertise in their fields. Perhaps by taking a class they are teaching, reading a book about their journey, or by watching a mindset building tutorial. The main takeaway I have from this excerpt is to do this more proactively and to actually reach out to the people who have already taken some of the steps I am about to.

A massive thank you to Jaena Kim for the interview and to you for listening. We hope you enjoy today’s segments please feel free to share your thoughts on social media and in the comments. Or write an email to podcast at Longitude.site. We would love to hear from you. Join us next time for more unique insights on one digit sound bytes.