While playing piano recently, I’ve reflected on how various aspects of practicing music are also great metaphors for life. In many ways, the struggles of learning a new piece are a microcosm of the struggles of life. By the end of this article, I hope you’ll have learned something new, or at least a new way to express something you’ve already long known.
Deliberate Practice
Anyone who plays music knows that there are two different ways to practice:
- Stumble through the piece, enjoying the parts you recognize but ignoring the mistakes.
- Slowly practice isolated sections of the piece over and over until you’ve mastered each one. Then, chain those segments together and refine them.
Method 1 is fun but not very productive — you don’t have to put much effort in but you improve very slowly.
Method 2 is undoubtedly better for learning. You improve much faster, but it commensurately requires more focus and perseverance.
I think you can apply this model to life as well. On any given day, we default to autopiloting through our activities, improving slightly due to our exposure to new stimuli, but in general, maintaining the status quo. Think about any aspect of your life that you’re displeased with — appearance, physical activity, stress, relationships. You probably know what you need to do about them — the hard path, the thing you’re putting off. If you want your life to play like a song, then you have to master the individual aspects of it.
Build Scaffolds For Yourself
Something I’ve been doing more recently is making notes in my sheet music. I have all my sheet music on my iPad, so it’s easy to just make little notes with the Apple pen.
One specific thing that I’ve done that has helped me tremendously is coloring in notes that have accidentals/that are black keys. If it’s a four-note chord with some black keys, it’s usually hard for me to read it on the fly. By coloring in the black notes, I’m essentially caching the time it would take me to figure out the chord when reading it, and this helps me learn a piece until muscle memory develops.
For some reason, I used to be averse to doing this. It may have been an artifact left over from my piano lesson days when a teacher marking the paper meant a repeated failure on my part, but the way I use annotations now only serves to help me, with no real downside.
In my “Minds and Machines” philosophy class, I learned of hostile scaffolds — designs in the physical world that make it harder for us to psychologically make good decisions, such as the lack of clocks in casinos or the lack of aisle organization in Costco warehouses. Scaffolds can be positive too, such as a calendar helping you remember your appointments, or a pill organizer with 7 days, and annotations seem to fit into this category. They take a load off of my brain. Lesson: there are no-drawback improvements that you can make to your environment that will improve your life; you simply need to find them.
Take a Breather
Often, I’ll struggle with a certain part of a piece, and try to take my advice of isolating it, slowing it down, and practicing it deliberately. I’ll believe that I have it mastered, start from the top of the piece, and then fumble when I get to that section again. Frustrated, I’ll quit playing that piece. Miraculously, the next day, I’ll be better at that section the first time I play it. It doesn’t make any sense that I’m better after time away than I was after time practicing, but it just happens that way so often.
How can this be applied to life? I think one lesson you can draw from this is that you can’t expect results from your work right away. Your muscle gains from the gym take a while, as do your monetary gains from your financial investments. If you can’t enjoy the process of going to the gym or the feeling of investing money, then it’ll be harder for you to reach your goals. Don’t aim for massive improvement in short bursts — aim for small wins and the consistency to allow for compounding. If I hadn’t returned to piano the next day, I would have never felt the payoff of having gotten better.
Together is Better
I only recently got back into playing piano. It was long overdue- I had bought a decent keyboard a few years ago to replace the gravitational well of an upright piano stuck in my childhood home. Even after buying the keyboard, I seldom practiced more than once a week, sometimes going months without playing.
This all changed when I moved to California for work. My dad stoically drove most of my net worth down from Vancouver, which included my keyboard. However, it wasn’t the where that revitalized my joy for piano, it was the who. My new roommate, a friend from my university cohort, showed an interest in learning, and much like bikers who draft off of each other, we now take turns daily, learning and practicing new pieces.
I’ve been mentoring him a little bit. I can’t take credit for all his improvement, he practices every day, but hearing him improve is a genuine joy that I only expected to feel after becoming a parent. “Together is better” is such a simple lesson — it was my elementary school’s motto — but it’s completely true. It’s not even particularly music-related, but I just think it’s an idea worth sharing. When you light a candle with another candle, the first candle isn’t diminished.
Music is beautiful. If you could scrub through a timeline of all the music you listened to throughout your life, you would probably cry, remembering all the joy and sadness associated with different times in your life. Music is a multi-dimensional tapestry, deeply intertwined with our lives, and as I hope I’ve shown, it can teach us how to live better lives too.
