Unlearn to Learn

I didn't sign up for this I thought as I fought with myself to count each beat per measure.

Well… actually I did!

I took piano lessons as a kid. While I dabbled at the keys in high school and college, I abandoned playing for decades. But when I turned 60, a friend – more musically gifted than I – suggested that I follow his example and go back to playing.

So I did, and for the past decade I have been playing regularly, even studying musical theory and composition. But I avoided piano lessons.

Until now. My teacher -- himself an accomplished pianist and arranger – has shown me how to break down a score into phrases and practice those short bits. He warned me, however, me not to play these phrases more than seven times in a row.

Seven times in a row!!!

I can feel myself shrinking into my ten year-old self, bent over the keyboard, slowly playing a piece over and over again. Back then the only sound I heard was my friends playing baseball next door. (Such was the disadvantage of living next to our ball field – our empty lot next door.)

There is precedence for what I am doing. Management theorist Jim Collins, author of Good to Great and so many other seminal leadership books, wrote that at age 40, he hired two young coaches to teach him to climb better, something he had been doing for decades. Jim wrote he had adopt the mindset of “stepping backwards in order to step forward.” Doing so invigorated him and he became a more adept climber by letting go of old techniques to acquire new ones.

Call it “unlearn to learn.”

So I struggle, making sure to get my 70+-year-old thumb and forefinger to pivot gracefully keeping time as best I can.

?No more than seven times in a row, mind you.

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