My Biggest Mistakes as a Former Music Student

Let's start with the first one that probably most people will be able to say this but I feel like that I can say this without hyperbole.

Not practicing enough.

Sometimes I talk to colleagues of mine.

I teach three days a week students in person local to this area in a music studios where we have several lessons sometimes up to a dozen music teachers at one time for various instruments.

And I've been very good friends for almost the entire time I've been teaching with a guitar teacher.

And he'll talk about just the insane amount of hours that he used to practice and that he still does.

He is one of the best guitarists I've ever met.

But he'll share his childhood memories and he's like within a few months of being the exact same age I am.

And I don't have those same memories because I was quite lazy when I was growing up.

And I don't just mean for music.

I just mean I was the type of child who had to be told to do anything worthwhile.

It has broken my heart as a teacher whenever I've had parents withdraw their students from taking lessons because, quote unquote, they weren't choosing to practice on their own.

They were having to be forced to practice.

One of my earlier episodes is called The Myth of Self-Starting.

It's a concept I might come back to later on, but in a nutshell, I don't believe most people are self-starters when they are young.

And I think that before you get into the comments and say, well, I was, I think you should read some articles about how we revise our history how our memories kind of distort things if you want my more detailed arguments you can check out that episode again it's called the myth of self-starting and in case you don't see it on the video or if you're listening as a podcast i will put that episode in the show notes in the description but if you're unpersuaded and you think well i've always been a self-starter well this is a regret you won't have to worry about then because i was not I practiced the bare minimum that my parents would allow me to do, with the exception of when I had a pending performance.

It's kind of like I was the type of student who did not study until it was time to take a test, and then I would cram it in.

I didn't practice enough because I didn't really appreciate that the practice was what got me to where I wanted to be.

One regret that I didn't have, that I think a lot of my students that I've had over the years can say that they've had, is knowing what a really good pianist sounds like.

Over the years I've had students, because their parents signed them up, and I think the limit of their experience might be listening to their friends who were barely more advanced than them, or hearing me demonstrate the pieces that they're trying to learn, but they had no idea what true elite musicianship sounded like.

or looked like.

I had an older brother who was quite advanced, and he introduced me to people like Vladimir Horowitz and Ashkenazi and Richter and Rubinstein and Van Cliburn and a bunch of other pianists.

And I understood.

I was a long way away from where they were, so sometimes that can be an issue.

You don't understand how far you have to go.