The F Chord Opportunity

I’ve been working on playing guitar for about a year.

It is, mostly, harder than I’d expected—given my lifelong experience as a musician—but also extremely enjoyable. Moments of playing a truly beautiful, soulful tune, or of getting my girls to sing while I play, are nothing short of transcendent.

One of the challenges every beginner guitar player will face is learning to play an F chord.

To play it properly, you need to curl and press down firmly with your middle, ring and pinky fingers, and, simultaneously, press down three other strings with your second finger.

Getting it to sound like anything other than a buzzing mess was, at first, impossible. Playing this F in tempo, as part of a song, still seems ludicrous to me.

Each beginning guitar player must decide how to confront this challenge. The natural thing to do is to avoid it: you can do a lot on the guitar without being able to play this awful chord. You can avoid songs that have it. You can play a ‘mini’ F chord, which is much easier. Never learning the F chord, and all the associated bar chords, seems like a viable path.

And yet, there’s not a single “real” guitar player out there who can’t play an F chord.

So how do we handle this as guitar players and in other part of our lives? How do we approach the skills that we could easily dodge and we think no one would notice—skills that are high leverage specifically because the only way out is through.

Skills like learning how to:

• Sell
• Write code
• Coach
• Negotiate
• Give honest, constructive feedback
• Hear honest, constructive feedback
• Put yourself on the hook
• Keep your promises
• Own your mistakes
• Make strategic choices with incomplete information
• Disagree productively
• Develop resilience around our motivation
• Influence without authority

F chords are everywhere, they’re just not always easy to see.