An acquaintance of mine just took up tap dancing after a lifetime of wanting to try it.

Con: He’s middle-aged and too shy to try a class.

Pro: It’s 2023. You can get tap shoes delivered to your door, and there is a wealth of instructional materials, many of them free, to help you get started and get going.

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If you don’t want or need to be the best, you’ve got an extraordinary opportunity.

Instead of sweating about trying to get into Harvard (acceptance rate: 4%), you can attend UMass Lowell, less than an hour up the road (acceptance rate: 85%).

Rather than being the eye doctor with thirty years of experience and a waiting list, you can be the one that people call when they can’t get into that guy’s practice.

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As a culture, we seek to create gentle environments for young children.

We give them thoughtfully designed toys and games and plenty of encouragement. We let them play with paints and make a mess. We tolerate it while they bang around on the piano. We offer them opportunities to help us with tiny tasks around the house, the garden, and in the kitchen.

It’s okay if it takes years for them to learn — we have years.

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Nobody talks about this book anymore, but The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua made a big impression on me when I read it back in 2011.

At the time, I was a full-time music teacher and the director of a music school that I had founded. I read Chua’s accounts of her daughters’ brutal six-hour classical music daily practice regimens with horror.

Horror at how badly she apparently treated them and made music a misery.

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In the first stage of learning, we figure out what to do.

The next stage is to be able to do it.

Then comes the ability to do it well, over and over again, over a period of time.

In your profession, projects, and pastimes, you find yourself playing in all three of these stages at once, based on your knowledge, skill, and stamina in different aspects of the work.

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