Guitar Lessons as a Career Development Tool

I'm diverging a bit from my ChatGPT odyssey to delve into a discussion about career expectations and development.  If you've read my About This Blog page, my intention for this blog isn't solely to document my road to riches via Generative AI (hah!) but also to weave in the parts of my life that got me here: 

• My experience as a manager
• My experience as a worker drone
• Miscellaneous uninformed opinions shouted through a digital megaphone

In this post, I'll draw a few parallels between my experiences as an amateur guitarist and songwriter and my development as a software engineer and a manager of software engineers.

I picked up guitar relatively late in life (or so I thought) at the ripe old age of 18.  I'd had some experience with music prior to that - mostly as a thoroughly sub-par trombonist in middle school who practiced at most once every two weeks.  Unfortunately, my natural musical talent did not carry me past my lack of practice, and I had to abandon my ambitions to be the next jazz great by the time I entered high school.

Five years later...

I can't definitively recall what made me want to pick up guitar after my first year of college.  I don't remember wanting to be a rock god (though I'm sure if presented the opportunity sight unseen at the time to become one, I wouldn't have turned it down).  I believe I just wanted to live out the simple and not-at-all-unreasonable dream of becoming a craftsman who wrote compelling songs and was able to make a living without selling out (it was the 90s, so everyone was afraid of selling out) while also being a guitar virtuoso (unsung except in the hippest of circles, of course).

Observation 1:

Gee, look at the parallels here.  I was looking at a self-sustaining career that didn't require me to bow to perceived arbitrary rules from a nominal authority.  It appears some things don't change over time.  Prudent decision or not, it at least helps me recognize a core value - I'm more interested in effecting change at a small level rather than swinging for the fences and incurring all the risks that entails.

Shortly after starting to play, a friend of mine introduced me to another friend of his who'd been playing since he was 13.  Feeling insecure and hoping to get a sense of reassurance, I asked if he thought it was too late for someone to learn guitar at 18.  He responded that "yes, it probably was," and offered no further commentary.  

Though this didn't stop me cold, it did put a hitch in my motivation.  Looking at it decades later, it's a bit ridiculous to imagine that two 18-year-olds talk about opportunities that have likely passed them by had any proper perspective, but if you're at an age where 5 years is approximately 33% of your life span, the statement has some merit.  I imagine one 5-year-old asking another if it's too late to become a surgeon because the other started the game of Operation a year earlier would have a similar response - "you've let 80% of your life pass you by and you have nothing to show for it."

Observation 2:

This tracks fairly well with my computer science/software engineering career.  My bachelor's degree is in mechanical engineering and I actually worked as an engineer for a few years before going back to school for CompSci, so I had hesitations about getting into the field late.

In addition, there's a pervasive myth that if you're not programming by your early teens, you're too far behind to get into the software engineering field.  This, I will state definitively and unapologetically, is bullshit.  Programming as a hobby may help you hone your career choices, but it doesn't give you any advantages as a professional software engineer.  In some ways, it can hinder your career (if you're a stubborn sort) because you've picked up so many bad habits as a hobbyist that they're hard to undo.

Unlike, say, deciding to start a professional basketball career in your 40s, any age is a good age for giving programming a try.  It's like anything else - some people are more inclined to it as a skill and some people have more immediate enthusiasm.  Others struggle the first few times they try to pick it up (ahem, yours truly) but eventually find their niche.  And others simply don't find it to be their metier and move on.

What programming (or anything) is not is a calling that only a select few who have been blessed can participate in.  These myths are propagated by people who are so insecure they need to differentiate themselves as distinct intellectually through a mix of pretention and intimidation.  

Others are concerned that opening the market will violate their beloved culture or reduce their chances of employment.  What they don't realize is that most things in life aren't zero-sum.  The more opportunities expand for others, the bigger the pie is for everyone.  Yes, you may have to adapt slightly and you may have to give up some of your long-held, dubious traditions; but you'll ultimately be happier if you don't cling to your preconceived notions and embrace new ideas.

Shortly after picking up the instrument, I decided to take guitar lessons. While I would encourage anyone to take at least a few lessons, seeking advice from others - even experts - is a double-edged sword (for what it's worth, I still take lessons to this day).  

On the positive side, I had someone with knowledge holding me accountable to practice with some regularity.  There are several concepts I was able to pick up much faster with the help of a mentor.  I learned to appreciate genres (specifically jazz) that I hadn't even considered prior to picking up the instrument.  I also got a deeper understanding of music in general.  In order to communicate more efficiently with my instructors, I learned music theory, which, in turn, helped my playing and songwriting abilities later. 

On the negative side, there's a lot of conventional wisdom that accompanies learning an instrument: 

In order to learn to play effectively, you must learn the basic chords and scale patterns and practice those without fail until they become second nature.  After years of dedicated study, you'll be able to play with blinding speed and improvise without fail.

None of this was ever echoed verbatim by any of my teachers, but it's hard to buck conventional wisdom when it's so ingrained in us.  My second guitar teacher recommended I pick up a copy of Mickey Baker's Complete Course in Jazz Guitar, which I did.  Mickey Baker was an excellent guitarist, and I learned a lot about chord composition from his book, but one line, in particular, haunted me for decades (literally, decades) - "you must devote yourself to practicing an hour a day, every day."  

This dovetailed with observations from people like Malcolm Gladwel who've made claims that, in order to become an expert in something, one must put in 10,000 hours of practice.  In a chosen career that seems somewhat reasonable (it's 40 hours per week for 50 weeks per year for 5 years), but if you're trying to achieve these gains outside of a full-time job, unless you're obsessive, it's only something you can grasp at without burning yourself out.

Observation 3

I've stated it once in my blog and will probably do so again numerous times before I'm through - there's no silver bullet.  The same construct that allows you to rapidly access knowledge and improve can also be the same construct that keeps you tied to a conventional manner of thinking or has you chasing goals that weren't yours to begin with.

In business, a corporate job can offer relative stability, training, and an accessible group of peers, but companies - especially as they grow larger - begin to display emergent behaviors that may run counter to every individual's common sense within the company, but, when viewed through the lens of organization at-large, seems to make perfect sense.

Determining when to follow conventional wisdom and when not to is extremely difficult.  Humans, because we're social animals, are hard-wired not to violate social order, even when it's harmful.  Our brains perceive ostracism from society as the ultimate punishment, so we'll perform mental gymnastics to ensure that anything that doesn't make sense in our heads initially will be rationalized appropriately.

Even when we're able to face down the possibility of ostracism, any reasonable person who wants to swim against the school should ask - am I doing the right thing here?  Conventions exist for a reason - they work the majority of the time and help ameliorate the uncertainty of situations that would otherwise drive us to distraction.  

However, we often become so reliant on them, that we often mistake them as the only possibility.  To borrow from another creative art - 

In western painting, prior to the Renaissance, painters created flat points of view with elongated figures who obviously weren't representations of real people.  This was to prevent the populace from worshipping the paintings and was enshrined as the only method for artistic representation to the point that people didn't consider other styles.

The Renaissance introduced perspectives with a vanishing point, though, and suddenly the concept of verisimilitude and 3-D representation was now possible.  It completely upended the art world and made the period renowned for its realism and attention to detail.

If someone had introduced this concept 200 years earlier, it's possible that it would've been tossed out as nonsense or, worse, had the artist burned at the stake for heresy.  This isn't to say that all novel ideas are ahead of their time - some are horrifically bad (almost anything by a Tech Industry billionaire after they've made their first billion, for example) - just that paradigm shifts are hard to gauge.

Because I was young and invested in conventional wisdom too much, I lost touch with my guitar skills.  I reasoned that, since I couldn't practice an hour per day, why bother practicing at all?  I also got so caught up in learning the basics of my craft, I lost sight of what a guitar is useful for.  I could remember all of the major positions of the CAGED system, but I could only run them up and down when it came time to improvise.  Eventually, I abandoned guitar for years and pursued other hobbies.

 As with all good cliffhangers, I've got a redemptive second act to impart to this story, but I'll leave now, briefly, while the protagonist wanders alone with no apparent hope for reconciliation with his beloved instrument.

Until next time my human and robot friends.