What’s Your Sport?

We musicians are brutal on ourselves. All we notice is who does things better than we do. There seems to be no end of criteria we can use to conclude we are fighting an uphill and losing battle against the tides of real accomplishment.

Part of the problem, of course, is that the better you get at something, and the more you know about it, the more you realisze what you don’t know.

When you first learn to play music, just learning and knowing how to play one chord is like conquering Everest. It is magic—your first taste of Superhero-dom. For some, the journey stops there, and that is fine. That is a fully actualized state that I think many of us farther down the line sometimes find ourselves nostalgic for.

For others, it’s a gateway. Knowing a little means wanting to know more. Painting time with sound is one of nature’s most alluring carnival rides, and once you get in that race car, you never want to get out. So you set out in pursuit of more. More chords. More ways to play them. More ways to paint time.

That is when the interesting thing happens. Musicians, like athletes, generally represent a personality type that is very comfortable identifying personal weaknesses for purposes of strengthening those areas. We isolate, target, repeat. We try that same skill live, in real time, and continue going back and refining until it’s in our fingers and our souls.

So, as a species, we are primed to notice our weaknesses.

That is great, until it’s not. Music is an endeavor at which we improve but never arrive. As you improve, the people who remain “better” than you are by definition those who are further and further along the improvement journey. The journey is infinite; there is no king of the hill waiting to be deposed. There are infinite hills and infinite monarchs. And the better you are, the better the people who are better than you, also are.

This is one instance where it can help to do a little looking backward instead of forward. Instead of noticing who or what remains in front of you, doing what you can’t do—which by definition is an infinite list—it’s helpful to look back at what you have done and can do. That’s a closed set. As our skills become ingrained, we can tend to forget the toil it took to acquire them. So we keep using wherever we are now as our baseline. But it’s not. Wherever we are now is where Past Us used to aspire to and find infinitely hard to reach. It’s not bad to notice that every once in a while.

The flaw isn’t our shortcomings. It is confusing our shortcomings with failure.

That’s the cruel trick the perfectionist’s brain plays: “if you were really any good,” it says, you could do that, too.

To quote the Bible: Bull-mother-fucking-shit.

A student reminded me this week of some advice I’d given her, and I would be well-served to remember it myself sometimes: Think about the Olympics. Do we complain that the person who can run the fastest 400m can’t also compete in the Artistic Swimming category? Or even in the 5,000m? Every athlete there—definitionally the best in the world at what they do—is among the worst in the world at all the events they do not do.

So although we are constitutionally inclined to notice all the skills we’re not mastering and the genres we’re not conquering—and that’s good and productive and useful and unavoidable—we also need to slow down long enough to ask: what is my event? What’s my sport? What do I do that no one does better, or at least, that I’ve never done better? Compared to what we don’t do, we are constant failures. Compared to the artist we have worked to become, and were yesterday, we are at our peak. Every day is a new record we set.

This month’s unsolicited advice is: find your event. What’s your sport? Just because it’s easy for you now doesn’t mean it came easy, or is easy for anyone else. We’re still always going to notice when we’re not swinging the bat well. But behind us are nearly infinite versions of us for whom our current bad swing was their Everest.

Josh Weinstein is an SDMA-winning songwriter, arranger, producer, and pianist/organist/keyboard player originally from New York. He holds a Ph.D. in music and teaches college and private lessons across a variety of disciplines. His dog is way cooler than he is.