Yoda’s teachings and what you can learn from his wisdom when you feel stuck in your progress creating great audio mixes and masters

Yoda says: “You still have much to learn. You must unlearn what you have learned.”

Besides the remarkable general wisdom of the Jedi master Yoda, this quote particularly reminds me of the concept of the “teachability index” which I have learned from a Freemasons master of the highest level back in the days. Before any rumors arise, let me state that I have never been a member of the Freemasons but I was lucky enough to get access to good chunks of their secret wisdom which is taught from the master to the apprentice. The teachability index of the apprentice is quite a core tool of the master to monitor and help his apprentice to make progress by keeping learning and applying the learned knowledge properly.

Our aim at Mastering Academy is to really help our students to succeed with their skills to deliver highly professional top notch productions by mastering the last 5 to 10% of the mixing & mastering skills needed. Sometimes it happens that some students get stuck in the learning process or they even get worse for a short period of time. This is the trigger for us to show up with the teachability index.

“You still have much to learn” refers to the first pillar of the teachability index. It’s basically in the moment when people think “Now I have grasped it”, they fall instantly back to “teachability index zero” which is 100% unteachable. If you ever catch yourself thinking this, you are well advised to correct yourself by this afterthought: “OK, I have grasped this aspect of the topic which makes me now ready to suck in more information on this subject”. Not knowing what (or that) you don´t know, instantly throws you back to being unteachable. Changing your mindset towards being always aware about the infinite presence of information you are not yet aware about is a crucial step to tip a toe into long term mastery.

The second pillar of the teachability index is the “Willingness to apply change”.
This is even more often the reason why students won’t make progress. They learn (in case they study at Mastering Academy) for example a new way to approach level staging in conjunction with our stem mixing technique but continue doing things like they have done it forever, but wonder why they don’t succeed. Albert Einstein would say something like this if he’d observe this: “It is stupid to expect a different outcome when you approach a problem always in the same way”.
When Yoda advises his apprentice “You must unlearn what you have learned” he probably means that you need to overcome old habits. You need to recondition yourself. You need to take the risk to try something new or approach a problem in a different way.
Once I was hired by a major German TV station to teach a dozen of tv broadcast audio engineers to transition the workflow from Pro Tools to Steinberg’s Nuendo. They initially felt like victims and I was the bad boy who wanted to take away their favorite toy they were used to playing with for more than a decade.
They really gave me a hard time starting every sentence or interaction with me with the words “yes, but…”. I allowed them to cook me for a while until I felt I had grasped enough of their workflow demands. I was getting a bit louder and said “Just forget about your stupid old way of working and be open for a moment to learn about a new way of doing that which will be way more fun, more efficient and three times faster. I don’t want to copy stupid steps of your previous workflow, but I show you better alternatives.”

The group came over their unwillingness to apply change and after a few days they were so happy with the new way of working that they couldn’t think of going back – ever.
They could render out 8 different versions of a trailer with the push of one button while PT would let them render 8 single times which would take 8 times longer.
I was just able to get there by breaking their unwillingness to unlearn what they have learned and practiced for so long.
So, if there is too much of “yes, but…” in the room, there is a teachability index alert. 

Keeping an eye on your teachability index is quite an accelerator for your career and general progress in life.
And when you now think “Thank you Friedemann, I have grasped it”, I need to tell you that your teachability index just went back to zero 🙂