In his book Imagine, Jonah Lehrer writes about the advantages that come with having a childlike attitude:

Take this clever experiment, led by the psychologist Michael Robinson. He randomly assigned a few hundred undergraduates to two different groups. The first group was given the following instructions: "You are seven-years-old, and school is canceled. You have the entire day to yourself. What would you do? Where would you go? Who would you see?" The second group was given the exact same instructions, except the first sentence was deleted. As a result, these students didn't imagine themselves as seven-year-olds. After writing for ten minutes, the subjects in both groups were then given various tests of creativity, such as trying to invent alternative uses for an old car tire, or listing all the things one could do with a brick. Interestingly, the students who imagined themselves as young kids scored far higher on the creative tasks, coming up with twice as many ideas as the other group. It turns out that we can recover the creativity we've lost with time. We just have to pretend we're little kids.

Yo-Yo Ma echoes this idea. "When people ask me how they should approach performance, I always tell them that the professional musician should aspire to the state of the beginner," Ma says. "In order to become a professional, you need to go through years of training. You get criticized by all your teachers, and you worry about all the critics. You are constantly being judged. But if you get onstage and all you think about is what the critics are going to say, if all you are doing is worrying, then you will play terribly. You will be tight, and it will be a bad concert. Instead, one needs to constantly remind oneself to play with the abandon of the child who is just learning the cello. Because why is that kid playing? He is playing for pleasure. He is playing because making this sound, expressing this melody, makes him happy. That is still the only good reason to play."

Possible Preaching Angles: As these examples show, being childlike can help us be more creative and perform better as a musician, but childlikeness can also help us spiritually. (1) Jesus says we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven unless we become like a child. (2) Living in childlike trust in relation to our Heavenly Father can enable us to walk in obedience to him.