Many of us didn’t have the opportunity to learn to play a musical instrument at an early age. There could be multiple reasons why it didn’t happen – financial, parent’s lack of interest in music, and it could even be that you were told you are not musical enough.
Don’t get discouraged! It turns out though that we can develop in any field we choose to a non-professional but satisfactory level if only we invest enough time and efforts in it. There is one TED talk, given by Josh Kaufman called “The first 20 hours – how to learn anything”, where he shares his experience related to accumulating knowledge. Being a young parent and entrepreneur with almost no time to devote to his interests and hobby, he decided to make a research on quick learning. It turned out that 10 000 hours are necessary to acquire a new skill, which equals full-time job for five years. The thing is that this, at first look an enormous amount of time, refers to expert-level performance. Professional athletes, world-class musicians, chess grandmasters were studied to get this result. Josh Kaufman claims that 20 hours of solid practice are necessary from knowing nothing to becoming reasonably good at something. Translated into playing an instrument “reasonably good” means that you will be able to perform some songs, easy melodies and actually enjoy it and feel satisfied from the results. He suggests to approach the learning process intelligently, developing a scheme to follow:
Deconstruct the skill – see what are the elements of the skill that you need in the beginning and avoid getting lost in the sea of elements the skill in question possesses.
Learn enough to self-correct.
Remove practice barriers – all the distractions like phones, television, pets seeking attention, etc.
Practice for at least 20 hours.
Frustration barrier that exists at the beginning of our endeavour could be overcome by pre-committing to practice and stick to it long enough to reap the rewards. The barrier is not intellectual but mostly emotional. Some of the discouraging thoughts that might pop up in your head:
You might be intimidated by kids – prodigies, who play the violin at a level you might never achieve.
You might be thinking of the purpose of all this, doubting your own dream, refuting it with logical statements like “It’s too late to start something new”, “I certainly need a teacher and a lot of money”, “Violin is the most difficult instrument – the queen of all instruments…”, “What’s the practical side of this endeavour”, etc.
These are the justifications one gives to himself to postpone or even never get on with the actual task and see if there is any truth in them. The excuses come from: lack of self-confidence; a life that is comfortable and makes the mind lazy; being unreasonably busy, accumulating goods that give us little personal gratification; comparison with other people’s achievements and setting too high unreachable goals.
In today’s world, we are blessed with so much free available knowledge. Video tutorials give us an opportunity to learn at our own pace since everybody has a different level of concentration and free time available. Some non-productive dynamics between teacher and student could be avoided, as the process becomes more impersonal. All we need is passion and self-discipline. So get on with it and reward yourself with some divine music, performed by nobody else but you.