Achieving Mastery!

[tbeltrans]

The thing I find curious about these threads when they come up, whether here or in the piano form, and probably another forum that involves developing a skill...

...is why this thing about "talent" and how many hours it takes to "get there" is so darned important to people. Why can't we individually decide we want to do something, and then simply enjoy the process doing it?

I have taught guitar on and off over the years. The kids usually seem to just have fun with it, while for whatever reason, the adults seem caught up in whether or not they have "talent", whether they are catching on fast enough, Whether they can even learn to play at all, etc.

Maybe we can learn something from kids. Relax. Have fun. If you don't enjoy the journey, then maybe it is time to look elsewhere for something enjoyable to do. None of us ever "get there", but instead are ALL in the process of becoming. Ask any of the top-tier players and they will all tell you the same thing, as they continue in their own practice.

Watch youtube videos of Tommy Emmanuel. He simply loves the guitar. Period. He loves to play, and will find any reason to do so. That is what this is about, and not whether we have practiced 10,000 hours or not. Those who think otherwise are missing the point, and causing themselves eternal dissatisfaction in the process. Rather than trying to learn to play like Tommy Emmanuel, why not learn to love the process of playing guitar as much as he does?

Tony

[Doug Young]

Originally Posted by tbeltrans

...is why this thing about "talent" and how many hours it takes to "get there" is so darned important to people.

Agreed, if you don't enjoy it, why bother? If you do enjoy it, why obsess about how good you are relative to others? One of the great things about guitar is that it can be fulfilling and you can create good music even if you only play three chords. Mastery is being able to make the music you want to make on the instrument.

The "talent' thing has always bothered me, tho. It seems as if it discounts and doesn't appreciate the time and work people have put into it. I liked this comic I come across recently:

[rick-slo]

Would you spend 10,000 hours on some activity you had no natural talent for? IMO that is the biggest fallacy in the study and the "conclusions" drawn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection_bias

[Tele1111]

Originally Posted by Doug Young

<snip>
The "talent' thing has always bothered me, tho. It seems as if it discounts and doesn't appreciate the time and work people have put into it. <snip>

I absolutely agree with Doug on this.
It not only discounts the time, effort and study put
towards achieving a goal, but it implies that without
this magical “talent”, you couldn’t possibly achieve it on your own.
I grew extremely weary of hearing about “talent” more than 30 years ago.
I wrote this little card to express my thoughts clearly.



Mark

[Gordon Currie]

Originally Posted by Aaron Smith

I agree Jeff. I think that "talent" lives at the intersection of attitude and work ethic.

Perfect way to say it. I have known many hundreds of musicians, photographers, painters, writers, film makers in my life - most of them beyond competent - and one word I never hear them using is talent.

Talent as a concept seems to be commonly used by people who *think* they have little or none and need to justify why they are spending more time on <insert activity here> than on the area they profess to want to master.

For me, a useful indicator of potential progress is passion. Passion finds ways to get the job done.

[stanron]

I don't think practice alone is the key. It's been mentioned before in this thread but it's worth repeating. Those people who enjoy, or are fascinated by doing, whatever is called 'practice' are the ones most likely to develop 'talent'.

Doggedly pursuing practice without the enjoyment or fascination may not be enough.

[frankmcr]

No, it's talent - innate talent - that gets you there.

Did Tiger Woods work hard?

Yes.

Would the same amount of work get anybody reading this even past the cut at a Major?

You tell me . . .

[Mr. Jelly]

Originally Posted by J-Doug

I did the whole 10,000 hours+ thing. Did I get better? Yes. Did I achieve "mastery"? Maybe in some small ways. Does it really matter? Nope.

+1

Only it does matter to me as it was what I wanted to accomplish.

[Blueshoes]

I have a friend who seems to excel at just about everything he does. One day I mentioned to him how wonderful to be so talented. He said “ I’m not very talented but I work hard to acquire the skills needed to be good at what I do, if you don’t enjoy practicing you’ll never be any good at what your trying to learn”.

Practice guitar for hours every day. Do that for years on end and one day you will make it look so easy that people who have never done any of that will say you are blessed with talent.

[rick-slo]

Originally Posted by Blueshoes

I have a friend who seems to excel at just about everything he does. One day I mentioned to him how wonderful to be so talented. He said “ I’m not very talented but I work hard to acquire the skills needed to be good at what I do, if you don’t enjoy practicing you’ll never be any good at what your trying to learn”.

Practice guitar for hours every day. Do that for years on end and one day you will make it look so easy that people who have never done any of that will say you are blessed with talent.

Of course one would tend to say that, how hard they worked. As far as how much "talent" one has, how would one know how to separate that out from practice time. Probably one won't enjoy practicing if there is a near total lack of talent. It's a circular process, one feeds on the other.

[DukeX]

I practice playing poorly, and I am happy to say I have achieved success.

[Arthur Blake]

Originally Posted by Blueshoes

I have a friend who seems to excel at just about everything he does. One day I mentioned to him how wonderful to be so talented. He said “ I’m not very talented but I work hard to acquire the skills needed to be good at what I do, if you don’t enjoy practicing you’ll never be any good at what your trying to learn”.

Practice guitar for hours every day. Do that for years on end and one day you will make it look so easy that people who have never done any of that will say you are blessed with talent.

Enjoy practicing. That would seem to be the key.

I think it is important to love giving expression to music, then your practice takes on a higher level than simply focusing on technical aspects, but the technical execution is an integral and essential aspect that develops naturally over time.

So if you are working at something you enjoy, it's not exactly work in the traditional sense. I think the goal is to do that in life as much as possible. Remember the higher purpose in giving expression to the best in all you do.

That, IMHO is how one achieves mastery.

Although, on the mundane, functional side, I do believe if you simply practice well and play guitar for 2 or more hours per day, you will become a very accomplished player.

My point is only, why would you do that unless it provided additional intangibles, and recognizing the value of these, you improve more quickly, and treasure each step along the way, enjoying the music.

[SprintBob]

Replace talent with focus and passion and mix with consistent practice and you might get a musician out of it.

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by tbeltrans

Stories of the "urban legend" type abound of the uncle who just sat down at the piano and suddenly played p a storm, shocking all those within earshot who knew him well and had no idea he was so talented.

Stories circulated about the "kid" Johnny Lang, the blues guitarist who suddenly appeared on the scene, having only played guitar two years and at 15 years old, was fronting a band of otherwise adult players. Then, digging a bit, the truth comes out that he had been playing for 10 years by then, and was being coached by relatives and their circle of friends, who were themselves proficient guitar players.

When people cite sports figures or many well known musicians at the higher levels, the story is pretty much the same. These people were recognized for their intense desire and that was fostered, and then they had GOOD coaches and teachers to help maximize their practice time so they were working on the right things, not spending too much or too little time on these, and generally being groomed to succeed.

To me, it seems that it is the intense focus and desire that seems front and center, so I don't think we really know how much raw talent lays into it. Here in the Twin Cities, one ball player who achieved professional stature was Kirby Puckett. He often talked about how physically, he had a "body like a seal", rather than that of a honed professional sports athlete, and that he spent many, many hours practicing long after his teammates went home. That story seems much more realistic and probably is much more common than that somebody just discovered s/he had "talent" and off they went to stardom.

We really want, and often seem to need, to believe that it is only the massively "talented" that achieve greatness, because that lets us off the hook instead of facing the fact that just maybe we don't have the desire to spend all those focused hours, and/or to seek and invest in professional coaches and teachers beyond the common music store variety to get us to where we are so driven as the one thing in our lives, to go.

For me, the guitar is but one small part of my life. As such, it doesn't matter to me that I don't play like <insert name of favorite player here>. Instead, I have retired early, after having a very good and respectable career as a software engineer, and have been able to pay all my wife's medical expenses over the years, pay off our mortgage early, and live responsibly debt free (both of us having graduated without student loans by working our ways through college). That, to me, is just as much "success" as anything that could make the media headlines. I had my two years as a full time musician in a road band earlier in life, and it was fun for a while, but I chose to pursue another life and have long been content with that. I know I am not the only one here who has accomplished that, so hopefully others here will recognize their own accomplishments and keep the guitar part of their lives in perspective.

Guitar can be very enjoyable regardless of how well we do or don't play, and anyone with average ability can become quite good with the proper instruction, direction, and even an hour or so a day to practice. It happens over a lengthy period of time, but if the process is enjoyable, so will playing at every new level you reach. If it isn't like that for you, then maybe some other avocation would be a better pursuit. To me, asking questions about talent and how long will it take, are signs that maybe the journey isn't as enjoyable as it should be for an avocation.

Tony

Great post! Agree 100%

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by frankmcr

No, it's talent - innate talent - that gets you there.

Did Tiger Woods work hard?

Yes.

Would the same amount of work get anybody reading this even past the cut at a Major?

You tell me . . .

If they started at the same age as Woods, and had the same passion for it - yes, probably.

But of course "anybody reading this" is probably already too old to start.

"Talent" is one of those handy myths that helps us avoid having to explain anything. The more you actually examine so-called "talented" people - in any sphere - the more you find they put a hell of a lot of work and time into what they do. The need for a genetic explanation diminishes. (It maybe doesn't quite disappear, but certainly gets less necessary as an explanation.)

A good argument might be that "talent" is simply the ability to focus obsessively on one activity to the exclusion of all else, simply because you love it so much. Very few people have that level of monomanic obsession. Most of us find that we actually value personal relationships (friends and family) more than we value music. That's a mistake if you want to be super-successful. The person who is going to become a superstar musician is the person is the one who will play rather than eat or sleep or talk to anyone. Music is what gives their life meaning, way more than anything else. They won't stop any more than they would want to stop breathing.
IOW, it's a kind of madness. A beautiful madness, but still a madness.

Can you be born with that? Quite possibly. Certainly way more likely than being born with a rare musical potential. The actual activity one ends up focusing that (arguably) innate obsessiveness on depends on what one encounters in life - experiences that have some kind of emotional meaning and impact.

IMO, the issue of musical ability is the reverse of what many assume. All of us are born with musical potential. After all, music is universal across all human cultures - and in many cultures (eg in Africa) everybody is musical to some extent. But it's one of those peripheral capacities that needs switching on and promoting at an early age, or it just atrophies. (Obviously we can all learn music later in life, but the longer we leave it the harder it is.)

Childhood is not so much a process of acquiring knowledge and skills as of narrowing down one's innate potentials (the huge capacity of the brain) and focusing on practicalities: what matters from day to day. We learn what we need to learn, how to negotiate and handle the most common scenarios.
The brain has enormous spare capacity - it's evolved to be able to handle anything that the environment might throw at us. We're born ready for anything, in a sense. The question is: which bits of grey matter are we going to need, and which bits are we not going to need? More and more connections are going to be made around the activities we need, and not those we don't. The brain adapts, is shaped by its environment - rapidly in infancy, gradually more slowly later on.
It makes no sense - in evolutionary terms - for a small number of brains to have musical gifts, and the rest none. It makes much more sense that a part of all of our brains (say a language centre if there is one) can acquire musical adaptations if it happens early enough.