The gift of calluses
With practice and study, single chess moves are grouped into logical sequences, allowing you to more easily see patterns and possibilities. (Image by Wilhan José Gomes)
When you first start playing guitar, the physical pain can be quite a deterrent.
“It’s like getting a sunburn on your fingertips,” I tell students. “It’s okay. Keep playing every day — just take a lot of breaks.”
It gets worse before it gets better. However, for those who persist through the discomfort, magic awaits. Your body will, in obedience to your habits, provide assistance in the form of calluses. With this hardened extra skin, your guitar chords will ring out true and clear. Playing won’t hurt anymore, and your learning will accelerate.
If you don’t know that this is going to happen, you may not make it that far. You’ll take the sore fingers as a sign that you’re doing something wrong, and you’ll quit. But there are lots of opportunities for calluses if we know where to look for them. These can allow us to improve more rapidly than we ever could have predicted, in ways that we might not have thought possible.
Children figure out that they can get calluses on their palms from playing on the monkey bars on the playground or from walking outside in bare feet. And we discover that we can get hints about a person’s profession or chosen sport from their shape. Your body will always respond to your daily habits. Your very skin is optimizing itself for your chosen activities, from rowing to weight-lifting to rock climbing to yard work. Your muscles change as well, responding to repeated stress by growing stronger over time.
Of course, the same thing is happening in your brain. As you practice something, your brain is strengthening neural pathways that facilitate your new skill, just like a callus. The more you do the work, the stronger those pathways become.
As learners, we don’t always have the clarity to understand how this process is happening and which skills are being strengthened. It’s a bit of a leap of faith to believe that the hard work will pay off when it feels a bit like we’re wandering around in the dark just bumping into things. In this early learning period, trust is critical. If the learner doesn’t believe they can get better, they will quit; if they reach a threshold of frustration that is too high, they will quit.
My greatest frustration as a teacher is when I hear stories like, “Yeah, I tried that, but I couldn’t really get the hang of it.” It doesn’t matter whether I even know how to do the thing they were trying to do; I know that if they hung in there a little longer, their work would pay off. Their brain and body were primed to help them.
The challenge is always that these processes take time to show results. When we can’t see how we’re going to get from where we are to where we want to be, we get demoralized. What we miss is that there is so much that happens without our conscious awareness that will fill in those gaps for us. That’s what makes the difference. All we have to do is stay with our practice, day by day.
In countless fantasy stories, an individual is visited by a supernatural being or force and becomes endowed with magical powers. This happens in real life, except the force isn’t supernatural and our new powers aren’t magical. Night after night, as we sleep, our bodies reconfigure themselves, building on the learning we have done and the actions we have taken during the day. We wake up and we’re better and stronger than we were before.
Humans are built to be learning machines, adapting to our circumstances and maximizing efficiency. Your very physiology is a dedicated partner in your endeavors, supplying you with predictable support to make your learning easier. The ingredients are consistent effort, the passage of time, and sleep. These yield such gifts as calluses, stronger muscles, and a sharper mind. Enjoy!
