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That's consistent with my experience as a musician. I'm no prodigy. I don't have a musican background. When I started out, I couldn't sing in tune and I couldn'

That's consistent with my experience as a musician. I'm no prodigy. I don't have a musican background. When I started out, I couldn't sing in tune and I couldn't clap in time. All I did was dick around on the guitar on and off for over a decade. I've gotten pretty good at it just by sucking at it for a long time, and reducing the suckage one little bit at a time. Professional musicians simply do the same thing, but far more intensively, rigorously, systematically. Hours and hours of practice day after week after month after year. I once transcribed a post I read about this called The Mundanity of Excellence, by Daniel Chambliss: http://www.visakanv.com/blog/2014/01/the-mundanity-of-excellence-by-daniel-chambliss/ http://www.visakanv.com/blog/2014/01/the-mundanity-of-excell... EDIT: Also, to be fair, I think what stops a lot of people is– when they start out, they really suck, and they simply can't envision the path from sucking to being good. Because it involves many qualitative transformations. The mythologizing we do of successful people doesn't help. We get told this story about how all the people at the top one day discovered that they loved something so much that they wanted to work on it really hard forever. If this narrative changed, I think more people would get good at more things.

iMark 11y ago
The learning period is a good point. Contact juggling has a rather cliff-like learning curve and many people don't progress because of it. A supportive environment makes a world of difference. I hsf people around early on to who offered constructive advice and encouragement and that made all the difference.
- mitchtbaum 11y ago
  > A supportive environment makes a world of difference. I had people around early on to who offered constructive advice and encouragement and that made all the difference. One of my dad's greatest pieces of advice he gave me came as we drove back from a wrestling match I lost, like every single one before that one. As I hung my head in tired shame, he said, "people show more character in defeat than in victory."
  - triplesec 11y ago
    If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; Rudyard Kipling, If. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175772 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175772
mbrock 11y ago
I remember insisting very strongly to teachers and friends that my body was just simply not cut out to play barre chords on a guitar. I was convinced that it was impossible. Turns out... it's not. With music the contrast between the desired outcome and the actual results for a beginner is extremely, painfully, embarrassingly obvious. The whole point is that you want to make beautiful sounds, not horrible sounds. You want to be in tune, in rhythm, melodious, but instead you feel clumsy, weak, confused, tone deaf, and awkward. So that can easily kill your whole motivation if you don't really internalize the idea of progressive learning. John Holt's book "How Children Learn" has some thoughts about learning instruments. > There is a special sense in which it may be fair to say that the child scientist is a less efficient thinker than the adult scientist. He is not as good at cutting out unnecessary and useless information, at simplifying the problem, at figuring out how to ask questions whose answers will give him the most information. Thus, a trained adult thinker, seeing a cello for the first time, would probably do in a few seconds what it takes a child much longer to do—bow each of the strings, to see what sounds they give, and then see what effect holding down a string with the left hand has on the sound made by that string > That is, if—and it is a very big if—he could bring himself to touch the cello at all. Where the young child, at least until his thinking has been spoiled by adults, has a great advantage is in situations—and many, even most real life situations are like this—where there is so much seemingly senseless data that it is impossible to tell what questions to ask. He is much better at taking in this kind of data; he is better able to tolerate its confusion; and he is much better at picking out the patterns, hearing the faint signal amid all the noise. Above all, he is much less likely than adults to make hard and fast conclusions on the basis of too little data, or having made such conclusions, to refuse to consider any new data that does not support them. And these are the vital skills of thought which, in our hurry to get him thinking the way we do, we may very well stunt or destroy in the process of "educating him". > But the greatest difference between children and adults is that most of the children to whom I offer a turn on the cello accept it, while most adults, particularly if they have never played any other instrument, refuse it. One thing that really sparked my motivation for music even while I was sucking horribly was the realization that you can make pretty neat melodies in very simple ways, for example by just improvising on the 0 2 3 5 7 9 10 frets on the high E string and sometimes hitting the low E string for bass—this way you can sound kind of like an Indian raga without too much practice.
random_ind_dude 11y ago
Can you completely discount the part played by one's innate ability, though? I have been able to sing in tune and play percussion instruments (mainly the tabla) from a very young age, though I am no prodigy. Sadly, I was never motivated enough to put in the effort to become better at music and am still an amateur. I think I'd have had an (initial) advantage over someone who absolutely sucks at music and is learning to sing or play a percussion instrument. I feel the same thing when I look at people who are much smarter than me when it comes to intelligence.
- visakanv 11y ago
  That's an interesting perspective. It sounds to me like you did very well at things when you were young, and you maybe became used to being "good" or "smart" or "talented" without having to work very hard at things. As you get older, the only way to sustain that sort of advantage is to work hard at things you're not good at, but that requires stepping outside your comfort zone. Which is unpleasant. And additionally so if you had "innate ability" when you were younger (which I think is usually more about exposure than people realize).
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    This is exactly the demographic of Mensa: the highly intelligent non-achiever. For probably just the reasons you lay out.

iMark 11y ago

The learning period is a good point. Contact juggling has a rather cliff-like learning curve and many people don't progress because of it. A supportive environment makes a world of difference. I hsf people around early on to who offered constructive advice and encouragement and that made all the difference.

mitchtbaum 11y ago
> A supportive environment makes a world of difference. I had people around early on to who offered constructive advice and encouragement and that made all the difference. One of my dad's greatest pieces of advice he gave me came as we drove back from a wrestling match I lost, like every single one before that one. As I hung my head in tired shame, he said, "people show more character in defeat than in victory."
- triplesec 11y ago
  If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; Rudyard Kipling, If. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175772 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175772

mbrock 11y ago

I remember insisting very strongly to teachers and friends that my body was just simply not cut out to play barre chords on a guitar. I was convinced that it was impossible. Turns out... it's not. With music the contrast between the desired outcome and the actual results for a beginner is extremely, painfully, embarrassingly obvious. The whole point is that you want to make beautiful sounds, not horrible sounds. You want to be in tune, in rhythm, melodious, but instead you feel clumsy, weak, confused, tone deaf, and awkward. So that can easily kill your whole motivation if you don't really internalize the idea of progressive learning. John Holt's book "How Children Learn" has some thoughts about learning instruments. > There is a special sense in which it may be fair to say that the child scientist is a less efficient thinker than the adult scientist. He is not as good at cutting out unnecessary and useless information, at simplifying the problem, at figuring out how to ask questions whose answers will give him the most information. Thus, a trained adult thinker, seeing a cello for the first time, would probably do in a few seconds what it takes a child much longer to do—bow each of the strings, to see what sounds they give, and then see what effect holding down a string with the left hand has on the sound made by that string > That is, if—and it is a very big if—he could bring himself to touch the cello at all. Where the young child, at least until his thinking has been spoiled by adults, has a great advantage is in situations—and many, even most real life situations are like this—where there is so much seemingly senseless data that it is impossible to tell what questions to ask. He is much better at taking in this kind of data; he is better able to tolerate its confusion; and he is much better at picking out the patterns, hearing the faint signal amid all the noise. Above all, he is much less likely than adults to make hard and fast conclusions on the basis of too little data, or having made such conclusions, to refuse to consider any new data that does not support them. And these are the vital skills of thought which, in our hurry to get him thinking the way we do, we may very well stunt or destroy in the process of "educating him". > But the greatest difference between children and adults is that most of the children to whom I offer a turn on the cello accept it, while most adults, particularly if they have never played any other instrument, refuse it. One thing that really sparked my motivation for music even while I was sucking horribly was the realization that you can make pretty neat melodies in very simple ways, for example by just improvising on the 0 2 3 5 7 9 10 frets on the high E string and sometimes hitting the low E string for bass—this way you can sound kind of like an Indian raga without too much practice.

random_ind_dude 11y ago

Can you completely discount the part played by one's innate ability, though? I have been able to sing in tune and play percussion instruments (mainly the tabla) from a very young age, though I am no prodigy. Sadly, I was never motivated enough to put in the effort to become better at music and am still an amateur. I think I'd have had an (initial) advantage over someone who absolutely sucks at music and is learning to sing or play a percussion instrument. I feel the same thing when I look at people who are much smarter than me when it comes to intelligence.

visakanv 11y ago
That's an interesting perspective. It sounds to me like you did very well at things when you were young, and you maybe became used to being "good" or "smart" or "talented" without having to work very hard at things. As you get older, the only way to sustain that sort of advantage is to work hard at things you're not good at, but that requires stepping outside your comfort zone. Which is unpleasant. And additionally so if you had "innate ability" when you were younger (which I think is usually more about exposure than people realize).
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  This is exactly the demographic of Mensa: the highly intelligent non-achiever. For probably just the reasons you lay out.