The world needs all kinds of minds (Temple Grandin)

Where did it all go wrong?

How hard is it to keep on track with any plan? Pretty hard: take weight-loss for example! We plan our work, and work our plan. When it goes wrong (as it too often does) we're left feeling foolish and inadequate. We seldom stop and do enough analysis. Which is a shame. Usually we were a bit half-arsed in one area or another.

Do you (secretly) prefer planning to doing?

Do you hesitate to start until the plan is a thing of such perfect beauty that actually doing it might prove a bit of a let down? If your visualisation is good enough, chances are you've experienced the gratification already, and you're ready to move on to your next plan...

Do you (secretly) prefer doing to planning?

Do you get twitchy with wasting time navel gazing, all the thinking and talking? Do want to jump right in and get some action going? After all, half the issues that come up won't emerge from even the best planning, so get started already and make it work, right? What? Will your actions all contribute to the desired outcome? Maybe you kind of lost track of what the doing was all about anyway, you're all about the journey, not the outcome.

Or you could be like me, and shift between the two, depending on your mood or the task at hand. Both my best work, and my worst, have occurred when I did a bit of both! Working out what was different in my successes and my failures made life a lot easier.

Some examples from music teaching:

The planners keep practice diaries, and record the homework assignments religiously, and can tell you exactly what time of which days they have set aside to do them. They have a rewards system for each successfully completed practice session, culminating in a largish reward when a certain point is reached, eg. a new piece is complete. Sometimes they're so busy designing the process, they might, it's a bit embarrassing really, they might not quite get around to actually doing every practice session, especially if something else in their life throws out their rigorous schedule.

If I don't head them off at the pass, they eventually decide: Maybe I'm not talented enough to learn music, this is really hard, so I can't be any good. Or maybe it's just not the right time, it might be better to wait until I have more leisure so I can really focus on music...

Or, they decide to do more than was asked of them (more is always better, right?) and end up exhausted and distraught and their lack of achievement - they only achieved 50% more than I asked of them, after putting in about 150% more than I wanted.

If I don't head them off at the pass, they eventually decide: Maybe I'm not talented enough to learn music, this is really hard, so I can't be any good. Or maybe it's just not the right time, it might be better to wait until I have more leisure so I can really focus on music...

The doers get home and sit down at the piano and play for at least as long as I recommended. Or longer. They have a whale of a time, learning by doing, exploring a bit of this and a bit of that. Except they don't always remember to do the homework that was assigned. Or all of the homework assigned. They didn't really see the point. Or they did extra homework on two days, to make up for not doing homework on the other five, because hey, it's the same amount of time, except that they don't seem to have made as much progress as they thought.

If I don't head them off at the pass, they eventually decide: Maybe I'm not talented enough to learn music, this is really hard, so I can't be any good. Or maybe it's just not the right time, it might be better to wait until I have more leisure so I can really focus on music...

Other doers go home and do the homework assigned, then get stuck into another piece that looks interesting and they're sure they can work out on their own. Something not-too-hard looking like, oh, the full version of Scott Joplin's The Entertainer. It's just chords, right? They spend extra time (more is always better, right?) and end up exhausted and distraught and their lack of achievement - they spent hours and they've only got the first few measures happening - and after 10 half hour lessons too!

If I don't head them off at the pass, they eventually decide: Maybe I'm not talented enough to learn music, this is really hard, so I can't be any good. Or maybe it's just not the right time, it might be better to wait until I have more leisure so I can really focus on music...

Our society has a pervasive myth that learning music is hard, and requires talent. This primes most of us to failure at the get-go. Learning to play the piano takes about as much intelligence and hand-eye coordination as driving a car. (Learning to play the piano well enough to make a career out of it is a lot harder, and so is being a professional racing car driver.)

This pervasive myth means that many people give up their musical journey before they have to, rather than seeing that they are applying too much or too little energy and persistence to their plan of action. Or too little much or too little thought and attention to their plan of action.

And that's where it all went wrong.

This is post 73 of 100 posts in 100 days.

Music Lessons: too much & not enough

Modern instrumental lessons take people too far, and not far enough.

They're geared to turn six year olds into professional musicians by around 22.  

The usual path is by private musics lessons after school or by being pulled out of class. This requires discipline, with a minimum of 20 minutes daily practice (at the beginning) going up to 90 minutes+ daily to pass a higher exam.  That lasts for around 12 years till you finish secondary school.  You might also be in a band or an orchestra.  At 18, you go off to the Conservatory of Music for an undergraduate degree in performance.  The people I know completing performance degrees play for a minimum of four hours daily, and up to eight hours daily.

This is necessary because, for the past couple of hundred years, musicians and composers have been pushing the boundaries of human limitation in much the same way that athletes have. Lots of people can run a 4 minute mile nowadays, but that doesn't mean you'll quality for the Olympics, let alone win anything.  It's similar in the worlds of Ballet and Opera.  Everybody has to be better, today, than almost anybody could be 50 or 100 years ago.

It's bad enough that people emerge from such an education, only to find that there aren't enough jobs, and are branded failures for being technically more proficient than many of their teachers.  I have met people sent away by their music teacher because they're deemed not talented enough, or not disciplined enough to bother with.  At the age of 8!

Where is the place of the amateur musician?  The musician who plays for love.  Who wants to grow and develop in skill, but not slave away in a vocational sense?  Such an amateur is often graciously "allowed" to continue with lessons, usually in the "appreciation" or "leisure" stream. Well and good.  (This stream attracts the same prestige for the teacher as Remedial Mathematics does when compared to Calculus.)

I hope that such amateurs are not always treated as second class citizens who have failed to make the grade, because without them, playing music - not just listening to it - will become as esoteric as singing opera.