10 Surprising Life Lessons You Can Learn from Playing the Piano
Learning music and learning the piano can teach us a lot about life and help us grow as people. While all of these lessons apply to life, in the interest of helping those that are learning the piano, I’ve focused much more on how music helps us learn them!
1. PATIENCE
Learning an instrument takes a long time and far longer than most people expect. This fact is even more evident when you realise that you never actually reach “the end of learning an instrument”. Progression on the piano requires the ability to manage your expectations and over time you become accustomed to things taking much longer to learn than you initially thought. Often you know what you should be able to do but actually doing it takes time and it is acclimatising to this frustration which helps us learn to be patient!
2. MISTAKES ALLOW YOU TO LEARN
If we could already play everything on the piano, what would be the point in learning? This is a question I often ask students that find making mistakes demotivating. The reality is, without mistakes we wouldn’t know what to work on and we wouldn’t be able to improve. So mistakes should be a moment of clarity! You’ve found something that you know needs fixing - which is great!
3. SMALL GOALS ARE ACHIEVED MORE EASILY
This one might appear obvious. However, what I actually mean is that small goals are achieved with much less mental demand. On day 1 of learning the piano; if your goal was to learn grade 5 piano, then this would require a lot of mental resources to stay on track. Whereas if your goal is small and very achievable, eventually these small goals add up to big ones and the process is much more sustainable!
4. CONSISTENCY BEATS INTESITY
Practicing for intense periods of time has too major pitfalls. Firstly, your focus decreases and the quality of practice decreases with it. Secondly, it is much less sustainable and can often lead to quitting! This is why consistency is much better than intensity. Practicing for 10 minutes per day and not achieving everything you wanted to is much better than practicing for 4 hours once per week and eventually quitting. Play the long game and let your playing compound!
5. PROGRESS ISN’T LINEAR
This is particularly true for any motor skills. Unlike acquiring knowledge, motor skills require cooperation from our body too! This means that if you are practicing a technique on the piano, after some practice you may get it - but the following day, you may not be able to do it again. Music requires a lot of different types of learning and this means that sometimes you feel like you are learning a lot and other times you will feel like you are getting worse. It’s all part of the process.
6. CREATIVITY IS EASIER WITH LIMITATIONS
Writing any form of narrative art; a story, a piece of music, a script…all comes with endless possibilities. However this can lead to a mental block and not knowing where to start. Whereas if you give yourself some parameters and limitations, it is much easier to be creative. If I attempt to write a piece of music where my only restraint is that it needs to be 5 minutes long, then this is challenging - what genre/structure/chords/melodies should I use (if any)?! Whereas if I try to write a relaxed 5 minute jazz piece intended to be background music for an event with 2 solo sections in it - this has its limitations and will allow me to actually experiment and find the desired sound!
7. STORYTELLING IS THE KEY TO ART
An audience is much more likely to understand a piece of art if they can relate it to their lives. We’ve all seen those pieces of art that is just a small dot in the middle of a canvas - I don’t know about you, but I don’t get it! Yet, if someone explained to me that it represents the vast emptiness of the universe and how small and insignificant we are within it - now I’m looking at this art differently! This is because there is now a story attached that I can relate to. While, a dot on the page is still not the most interesting art in existence..music can be a little more explicit in the narrative we are trying to tell. Humans are storytelling creatures and stories are how we make sense of art.
8. IT’S NOT WHAT PEOPLE SEE, IT’S WHAT PEOPLE DON’T SEE
Many people will listen to great musicians and not fully realise the amount of work that it has taken them to get there. Much like looking at Jeff Bezos as the Amazon guy or Mark Zuckerberg as the Facebook guy - it’s easier to forget that they spent many hours per day over many years, in obscurity, sitting in their mums basements (metaphorically speaking) working on what would eventually become massive global companies. This is true for musicians too, we see the finished song or the performance of a piece - but we don’t see the hours sat at the piano practicing scales, making mistakes, repeating various bars and learning the craft!
9. PROCESS CREATES GROWTH, NOT OUTCOME
For most musicians at the beginning of learning, it’s easy to fantasise about the outcome and what it would be like to play a piece that is really impressive. However, the more you learn, the more you realise that it isn’t really about the final execution of the piece - its about learning the story, the meaning and being the type of person that can persevere through learning something challenging. The reality is that once you finish a piece of music, you move onto a new one and likely forget the piece…but you don’t forget what you learnt by learning it.
10. THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS FAILURE UNTIL YOU STOP
Learning the piano is a risky business. You might make mistakes (privately and publicly) and you might be worried about embarrassing yourself by playing something wrong. This is the case for everyone and it doesn’t matter! These moments are not a reflection of what your ability might become on the instrument. I have played many performances where I have made a complete mess of the piece of music, but carrying on learning and getting better means that the mistakes you made in one performance fade into irrelevance and don’t have any reflection on your ability. You only fail if those mistakes stop you playing all together.
Matthew Cawood
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