The absolute cruellest thing about learning a musical instrument as an adult (who didn’t study much music at school) is the inescapable fact that you have to practice being really, really, really shit at it for an *awfully* long time before you can reach a level of competence that even approaches adequacy.
@herdingdata that particular failure mode has killed so many potential hobbies for me. It’s compounded by my tendency to watch a ton of videos on how professionals do it, only to realise I am not, in fact, a professional.
The second cruellest thing: as your friends and family shower you with sincere praise such as “wow that was amazing!” and so on, your awareness, understanding and vocabulary with which to critique the many ways in which that little performance of yours was shit are all increasing at breakneck speed.
@herdingdata
The difference there is that children learning to play an instrument are just as bad for just as long but just don't care because they are used to it & in as much as they do care value improvement over some absolute standard.
It also helps that they can often spend more time on it, so more quickly getting through the X hundred hours to achieve competency.
This post contains graphic imagery pertaining to books of sheet music. Don’t say I didn’t warn you
@herdingdata but you also keep getting better that fast! So there are some consolations to learning hard things as an adult.
@herdingdata finding joy in being bad at things opens up so many worlds! I've learned to dance, to speak pretty good German, and still very bad Mandarin. None of which I would be able to do if I was still afraid of being bad at things as an adult!
But you know all this, as someone learning an instrument as an adult 🤓
It always makes me sad when friends and colleagues refuse to try a thing if they won't be good at it immediately. I think doing things even if you're bad at them is a super power.
The previous post is best enjoyed by imagining both the content warning and the post itself being narrated by the voice of GLaDOS
@herdingdata that sheet music was told there would be cake