Practice

Learning a musical instrument teaches things way beyond music. When I started my kids with music lessons (guitar, keyboard and drums) I sensed this. In those days there wasn’t research on that aspect, at least nothing I read or heard. I think I sensed or felt it mostly because of my own complete failure to stick with piano lessons. I wanted to play music. I love music. I always have.

I was brought up in a house filled with music. My father sang, listened to music, taught himself how to play the guitar and reminisced about the quartet he sang in when he was young. And my mother played piano—beautifully. I didn’t know this until I was about ten, when my father brought home a piano.

I don’t know that the piano was bought strictly for my mother. I really don’t think so because money was tight and usually if a lot of money was spent on something it was for us kids. I think the decision was as much for my brother as my mother. He wanted to be in his high school elite choir and that meant try-outs. It was the first time I realized my mother had talents beyond the home and my little world. I knew she was the best cook, sewed wonderful clothes for me and my sister, knitted beautifully, was organized and frugal. She kept the house immaculate and instilled in her three kids a love for reading. But surprise to me, my mother had this other life, this other wonderful, magical talent. (Imagine how I felt when I learned she could type and do shorthand with the best, too.)

I still remember the first time she sat down to play that second-hand piano. I don’t know if my jaw dropped, but my mind gasped. Her hands pranced over the keys and I wanted to play like her. I just didn’t realize what that meant—practice. And every stinking day, whether I wanted to or not. (I didn’t want to. I was much too busy playing make-believe, reading and making up my own stories.)

I didn’t understand that skill and genius is more than talent. Talent only gets you so far. Luck and opportunity helps, sure, but what really tips the scale is practice. Talent isn’t passed down in the genes but in the mindset.

In an article in the Dec.2008 Reader’s Digest titled, A Talent for Genius,” about Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown), speaks of this subject. Gladwell figures it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become what he calls an outlier.

Can you imagine? 10,000 hours. I learned from failing that if I wanted to do something well, I had to put in the time. That was one of the things I hoped my kids learned when I signed them up for music lessons.

And though they never knew, every time I took them to lessons, made them practice before they could go outside to play I wasn’t hoping I was raising Mozart, Eric Clapton or Ringo Starr. I was hoping my kids learned that anything you wanted to do well takes work, but it’s worth it. The work is rewarding and fun, when you stop fighting it. But more than that, I was teaching myself that lesson, too. I had things I would have much rather done than take them to lessons or nag them to practice, but nothing more important.

And through them, I learned that lesson too. I don’t know if I’ve put in 10,000 hours practicing my writing yet, but I’m working on it every day.