Why Learn to Play a Musical Instrument?

Why learn to play a musical instrument? Because it’s hard. Because it takes time. Because you have to invest some of your soul and your energy into it. Because it’s not just another instant-gratification sensation that gives a temporary high that wears off a few minutes later. It’s not Guitar Hero with a fake plastic guitar and a few buttons that operate programmed sounds. It’s not a toy or a video game. When you take the time and put in the effort it really takes to actually learn a challenging musical instrument, you might spend years to get to a place where you have incrementally built up some decent level of skill. You might even discover you have innate talents. You may also learn some valuable insights about creativity, and how to express what is in your soul to others on a level beyond mere words. You might develop a musical ‘vocabulary’ and learn how to ‘speak’ within the medium of music.

There is a whole other world out there far above the general dust of everyday living. It is the world of art and creativity. You earn the price of admission to that world by having an intimacy with music through your instrument and the skills you built up through effort, and time, and investing your soul into it.

I started to learn to play guitar when I was 8. It began a long journey that has transformed my life, my views, my attitudes, my expectations of myself and the world around me, it became part of my core identity down deep inside me, and made my life so much richer in ways that I cannot even begin to describe fully. I cannot imagine having lived my life this far without writing and creating music and playing guitar. The alternative seems unthinkable to me.

But apart from the whole creative and artistic side - you also learn an extremely important lesson about life at a very pragmatic level as well. You learn the value of hard work. You learn what it feels like to actually be good at something. Not just something that anybody can learn in a couple of hours – but when you find you have become actually really good at something that is difficult and impressive to others because not everybody can do it. You learn how good it feels to have accomplished something you set out to do – even though it took hours of practice every day for years.

Since no one else can give it to you, or buy it for you, or learn it for you, that means that when you do it – it’s truly yours. That’s why it becomes part of you. It literally becomes a piece of your internal identity. And forever afterwards, whenever you are faced with a similar challenge of having to learn something difficult that will take a long-term concentrated effort, you know within yourself that you can do it. You know what it takes, because you’ve done it before. You know how to apply yourself to something difficult, and you know how great it feels at the other end of it to succeed at it. It actually means something. It gives you a sense of self-worth. And it’s a blueprint for success for just about anything big you ever want to try later in your life.