Don’t fall for the myth of perfection
“The things that I have learned in my guitar lessons so far are really great. However, I need to master these things before I learn anything else.”
Have you thought about this or have you said it before? If so, you are not alone. Many guitarists have thought this way. On the surface, it sounds perfectly reasonable, right? Take the things you’ve learned and perfect them before adding more to your plate? Makes sense right?
Wrong! You don’t want to take this approach to learning to play the guitar. The reason is that if you spend the amount of time it will take you to master any element to play guitar in isolation, when you go to play anything other than that element, you will quickly realize that you now have to start over with this one. new article and perfecting it only to discover that something else will need the same treatment. You will repeat this over and over again and it will literally take you decades to reach your ultimate goal. How frustrating would that be?
I am going to use a non-musical example to further illustrate this point.
Suppose you planned to become a professional bodybuilder. You hit the gym on your first day of training and have made your plan on how you will become this amazing bodybuilder. You decide that the best way to achieve this goal is to work only one muscle group at a time until you build that muscle group to where you want it to be. To analyze how crazy this is even further, let’s say you only want to build that particular muscle group on just one side of your body. After exercising for a few months, how strange would it look if you had a huge left bicep and a small right bicep? What would that bicep look like compared to the rest of your body?
Pretty silly, right? Yes it is, and this is exactly what you are doing by concentrating solely on “perfecting” one aspect of your guitar playing while completely ignoring everything else.
Instead of focusing on perfection, focus on improving your guitar playing from week to week. If you are a better guitarist this week than you were last week and you have a way to measure this, every week. You are on the right track.
The mastery you are seeking will come and go faster if you focus on improving multiple areas of your guitar at the same time rather than taking out each element and trying to master them in isolation.
All the best for you and your guitar.
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