This is going to get a little corny but...I believe that every musician in fact every person has no idea of their potential. I've worked with some of the most successful innovative well known musicians, and still you can ask them to do something difficult and they'll say: "Oh hold on a minute, I have to work that out, I'll practice that and we'll do it tomorrow." And I say: please give me five minutes of concentrated effort, and I'll bet you won't have to do it tomorrow, you can just do it now. Almost in every case, when I ask somebody to give me five minutes of pure concentration, its AMAZING what comes out. An it amazes them too.

Its staggering the fact that it takes cajoling to get some of the most talented people in the world to just use five minutes to their utmost advantage. That's how little of our capacity we use. I'm not making this up its really true!

Days go by without much brain wave activity in a lot of cases. We go by our routines and habits and things like that. But the essence of being creative is seeing alternatives, and pursuing them. You know like a chess player. You see a chess player move a piece and think: Oh that looks like a lot of work he moved one little piece a couple of inches. But we all know before he did that, he went through this whole creative process of looking at the alternatives following them to their conclusions thinking of what would happen. There's some intense concentration involved there.

So I'm not saying you should play chess to do music but, that everybody does underestimate their ability. And its a generalisation, all generalisations have exceptions but, everybody I've ever worked with underestimates their ability. With the exception of the 'I am god, what are you doing talking to me' kind of people and they're very rare in the successful end of the business really, there are some but they're rare.

Steve Morse