Diary of a Player Read Online Free Page A

you’re just beginning to play as a kid, you’re much more likely to find yourself working on a one-note-at-a-time version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” than climbing any stairway to heaven.
    But if you have a little patience and you work really hard, then maybe you move on quickly to even greaterchallenges—like actual songs with maybe a couple of chords. Unless you’re a true prodigy, you’re going to have to practice for a while being bad before you get any good. And it will seem like a waste of time. I remember that feeling well. But don’t worry about wasting time, because it’ll be so worth it. It’s my experience that in the end, life lessons and guitar lessons begin to blur in all sorts of interesting ways.
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    It’s my experience that in the end, life lessons and guitar lessons begin to blur in all sorts of interesting ways.
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    A few years ago a smart guy named Malcolm Gladwell wrote a really interesting book called
Outliers: The Story of Success
that takes a serious look at what factors contribute to any individual’s success. One of the core conclusions that he reaches in his study is something he calls the “10,000-Hour Rule.” Basically, Gladwell writes that no matter what you’re doing, you most likely need to spend ten thousand hours working at it before you master it.
    Now, I don’t know how accurate that figure is for the guitar, but I get the point. Some of you out there reading may have been blessed with the good fortune of being born great at something, but most of us mere mortals still have to get good first, and that process usually takes a little time. I thinkit was years before I was doing anything you would consider “great.” But don’t be dismayed. Those weren’t bad years. Far from it. They were incredible and exciting in retrospect. A little hobby that seemed like a side interest was gradually becoming my focus. And now here I am.
    The big problem here is that getting any young person with a short attention span to spend ten thousand hours doing anything can be an uphill battle. That’s never been more true than these days when whatever kids do has to compete with so many attractive options. It can be surfing the Web, playing video games, tweeting, or Facebook. Back in my day, I confess that I played my fair share of Donkey Kong, but even then there was no Web for me to surf and I didn’t have a status. Well, yes I did, it just wasn’t posted anywhere yet.
    Whatever you want to do in this life, I’m here to encourage you not to lose hope or give up during the first hundred or so of those ten thousand hours that it takes to get good. You should know that in my case it took me a while to “get the bug” for guitar, as my grandpa used to call it. He always said it would happen, almost like a slow sickness. And he knew it would take time.
    I actually quit playing guitar for one summer because it was just too nice outside and I needed to concentrate fullyon playing sports, or at least that’s how I pitifully explained it to my grandfather. It’s easy to see why I did this—maybe I thought I could get good enough at something like baseball to actually have a future in it. More likely, at nine years old or so, I just felt it was too nice out that summer to stay inside and play the guitar. After all, the guitar is something you primarily just do inside, right? Boy was I wrong. Little did I know how infrequently I would actually play the guitar
inside
in the summer someday. I’d say 90 percent of my gigs from May to September are outside. These days, playing in the summertime is most certainly an outdoor sport. Truth be told, I think what I was really trying to do by taking a break was ease into quitting the instrument altogether. I really just didn’t love it yet. It hurt my hands unless I practiced all the time, it didn’t sound like anything on the radio, and I was