On Making Mistakes

I currently teach kids how to speak French.

If you've ever learned to speak a foreign language, you know how difficult it is, and how much time is spent completely butchering said language.

That's okay.

One of my colleagues says that learning to speak a language is like learning an instrument: before you make music, you make a lot of noise.

One day, one of my students parroted a platitude he had heard:  "FAIL stands for First Attempt In Learning."  At first, I kind of liked that.  As I thought more about it, though, I was bothered by the implication that you only fail once, and only the first time you try something.  I feel like that's a bit misleading.  Most of us have to repeat that step over and over again.

If you want to progress at a skill, you have to do the stuff that's a little bit too hard for you.  As one of my climbing friends said, in rebuttal to my protestation about trying a tough climb on toprope (it was rated 5.10), "you'll start climbing 5.9s clean when you start working on 5.10s".

My husband encouraged me to try more instruments when I started learning guitar.  I said "I want to get really good on guitar first, before I learn any others."  He said "you'll get better on guitar when you start learning other instruments."

Those guys are smart guys.  I learn more about learning outside of the classroom than anywhere else. But that's neither here nor there.

So, as I was beginning to learn to play piano, I decided to demonstrate how, if you expect to succeed at anything really hard (and I mean, come on, who wants to do easy stuff?) you'll be doing a lot of failing along the way.

If you'd like to see how fun it is to make mistakes, enjoy this 5-minute conflation of my 6-month journey attempting to learn how to play one singular song on the piano: