We recently connected with Belinda Niling Stohner and have shared our conversation below.
Belinda, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career.
I would like to see an emphasis on cultivating what academics call a “growth mindset”. This is the idea that we aren’t just born with or without certain capabilities, but that we can work and put effort into any skill to become great, or at least really good, at it. It’s the thing that keeps people from quitting when things get tough. So when we fail a test or don’t get a promotion, we’re empowered to think “I’m not good enough YET” as opposed to “I don’t have what it takes to do this”. Growth and fixed mindsets really influence how people act when they’re in a challenging situation.
There’s a book called “Grit” by Angela Duckworth that talks about this concept. I think if more students were taught to have a growth mindset, we would see better scores and better long term life outcomes than we’re seeing now. This is one reason music and other extra curricular activities are so important to childhood education. It teaches you perseverance.
I also hate it when people say, “I’m not a math person” or “it’s too late for me to learn this” because that implies that people with advanced skills woke up with their abilities. Any star athlete, great writer, or virtuosic musician will tell you it takes a lot of hours of intentional practice, regardless of your natural born gifts. You can learn to play violin at age 70. If you couldn’t, then at some arbitrary age, you’ve already decided that this is as good as it gets, and you’ll never learn another single thing again for the rest of your life.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Baby B Strings is an alternative string quartet based in Miami. Our ethos is about reinventing the concert hall. That can mean playing in a place that doesn’t typically have classical music or maybe playing violin with a kind of a song that might not make you think of violin at first. It’s about being creative and breaking old stereotypes, both in live performance and in recordings.
Growing up, a lot of the time that I wasn’t working at my parents’ restaurant was spent playing violin or piano. In that respect, I was like a lot of Asian-American kids in America. On the other hand, I was one of only a handful of Asian kids in small town middle America. I wouldn’t say I was treated badly, but I kind of felt like I fit in with the misfits more than the “regular kids”. I was already learning to play this balancing act at a young age — hanging out with the “alternative kids” while also associating with the academic kids — and that helped me learn to navigate different social circles as an adult.
What I eventually figured out is that I’m always going to feel a little out of place no matter where I am, and I can embrace that. It informs a lot of the way I choose to direct my music career, and I often find myself hunting for opportunities in places I don’t think my peers are looking. Fortune favors the bold, so sometimes it’s better to go left when everyone else is going right. That’s where Baby B Strings is.
We all love to play corporate events and big fancy weddings, but we also like the ones where we play in the local library, hospital, or homeless shelter. We bring the magic to your event.
Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?
As an entrepreneur, I am grateful that I have some of the best musicians in South Florida with me. I always advocate for them and never put them in a situation that I wouldn’t endure myself. A few times that’s meant standing up to difficult clients or eating sizable costs when deals go sour. Musicians are often undervalued and underpaid, so I always try to make sure they get paid fairly. Just like in friendships and many other things in life: the more you give, the more you will receive.
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
This is a great question because I’m generally a very curious person. I like to know things. Every now and then I go down a rabbit hole of listening to long form interviews. I’ve watched a lot of interviews with Jerry Seinfeld because he notoriously has a really solid work ethic and is really open about his opinions, but I do deep dives with other comedians as well.
I discovered a lot of new shows from YouTube, but recently I went through a lot of Marc Maron’s podcast called WTF. I’m not necessarily a big fan of his comedy, but his interviews tend to go pretty deep into the shaping and influences of the person he’s interviewing and their creative processes. They’re informative and inspirational because comedians have a really hard job. Their jokes either work or they don’t, and they always have to come up with new stuff. They really have to think a lot about things and how the world is. What I learned is that the best comedians go on the road and test their material over maybe a hundred or more shows before shooting a special. That tells you how many reps it takes to shape and polish a finished product, and even then, it might not be that great. It really put things in perspective for me.
Rick Rubin’s podcast “Broken Record” and interviews of Pharrell are also great. They’re both very thoughtful in their responses, and they’re different in their approaches to working with artists. You can get a sense of their work process and their philosophies on music and production.
The common thread between all the long form interviews are all the different ways that people became successful and “made it”. I think to a certain degree, I was looking for answers to “what do I have to do to become ‘successful’?” and “what can I be doing differently to get better?” It’s probably the closest that I’ll ever get to being in the same room and learn from them.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.babybstrings.com
- Instagram: @babybstrings
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/babybstrings
Image Credits
All photos by Cristina Isabel Rivera Sangama @cristinaisabelrivera