I played classical piano seriously for nearly 20 years. I practiced for a half hour every day when I was a little kid and three hours a day or more when I was in college.
Despite my hard work and commitment, I was a terrible sight reader, which meant I was very slow to learn new pieces. It didn’t come naturally, and over time I resigned myself to this reality: I was good at a lot of aspects of playing the piano, but sight reading wasn’t one of them.
About a decade ago I was talking with my kids’ piano teacher, and I shared how long it took me to learn new pieces. Casually, she said something that unlocked it for me: “I just think about it like reading the words on a page. Words are familiar, as are sentences and paragraphs, and I just think of it like that.”
I don’t know why that stuck with me, but it did, and suddenly sight reading made sense. And, even though I don’t play piano much at all these days, I now can learn a piece at least three times faster than I used to—I’m not a great sight reader, but I’m much better than I was.
Looking back, I can’t help but reflect on what could have been had I figured this out sooner.
By my math, I clocked somewhere around 8,000 hours of piano practice from the time I was 6 until I was 22, enough to become an expert by nearly any measure.
However, I also now see that I wasted a tremendous proportion of these 8,000 hours. Something like one third of all my practice time was spent slowly and inefficiently learning pieces.
Think about that: one-third of the time I devoted—to one of the things I’m best at in the world—completely lost.
What could the fix have been?
While I’d like to think that a more evolved version of my 10-year-old self could have somehow figured this out on my own, I doubt it.
What would have made the difference was if a teacher had said to me, “You have to learn this new piece in a week.”
I’d have struggled and failed, but hopefully she would have said it to me again and again and again.
And at the end of what would have been a miserable year for my young self, I’m sure I would have cracked the code. And then I would have walked a different path, a more productive path, with the remaining 6,000 hours of piano practice that lay ahead.
Imagine all the ways, big and small, we skip the most essential steps and unwittingly undermine the long, hard hours we’re otherwise putting in, including:
Day to day stuff like learning to type, or becoming really comfortable with using and learning new technologies.
New stuff like using AI every day, until it becomes second nature to us.
Hard stuff like, if we say we want to write well, forcing ourselves to write badly and often.
Rigorous stuff like developing a discipline of shipping our work on time.
Personal growth stuff like ensuring we’re getting enough feedback, so we can develop an accurate picture of our strengths and growth areas.
And healthy living stuff, like developing a balance relationship with food or sleep.
These are just some of the many gateways that are precursors to making the time we invest later yield more.
Nothing special needs to happen: we just need to decide to go back to the steps we’d skipped or glossed over, and reconcile ourselves to the fact that getting this important stuff right won’t, at first, be much fun.
Or we can find an accountability partner, someone like my hypothetical teacher to crack the whip and hold us to a high, and temporarily uncomfortable, standard.
And, of course, if we supervise or mentor other people, it might be time to be the whip-cracking teacher, as an investment in the long term.
One way or another, we owe it to ourselves to get the core skills right first, before it’s too late.
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