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I haven’t taken too many guitar lessons in my life. Though I spent years as a guitar teacher, ironically, I’m mostly self-taught.
Almost every teacher I tried did that thing where you pick up the guitar and do a fast run to show off.
No piano teacher I ever had did this. It must be something about having the instrument in your hand, just begging to be played.
Read MoreThe hardest work we have to do — the work that matters the most, the work that challenges us the most — is the work that nobody else cares about.
It’s not on a deadline, unless we create one for ourselves. If we never do it, no one will ever notice.
That’s why it’s really hard to fit this type of work into our workday, even if we work for ourselves.
Read MoreA good friend of mine is trying to find her way out from under mountains of clutter.
“I just hate to put more things into a landfill,” she said. Meanwhile, she took issue with the practices of one of her local charitable organizations and the politics of another.
The result is that she isn’t able to find a suitable place to discard anything, and the piles remain in her home.
Read MoreIt turns out that the nine-year-old piano students, the thirteen-year-old awkward middle schoolers, and the adult professionals I’ve worked with over the years have a lot in common.
One recurring theme is their (our) tendency to eliminate potential choices based on the whisper of a possible negative outcome.
We refuse to do something that we want to do because we’ll have to do something we don’t want to do along the way.
Read MoreWhen a kid cleans her room, she may use some unorthodox tidying tactics.
Theoretically, everything should find a home where it is grouped with like items. However, there isn’t always time and energy for that. Shoving everything into drawers and closets, while hasty and perfunctory, is actually a good start. At least the room looks tidy. The details can be addressed later.
There are many situations in school, work, and life where we get stuck because we want to to do things well. We might spend hours, days, or even years trying to summon the energy to approach our task the right way. In the meantime, the deed remains undone. If we give ourselves permission to take the easy way out — to do the work badly or take shortcuts — we may actually accomplish what we set out to do.
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