"Taut" Lessons

#268

Paraphrasing Robin Sharma, "Hard becomes easy, and easy becomes hard by choosing hard things over easy things". That was my motto this year - to "Do hard things."

A few months ago, I allowed myself to pause guitar lessons, after only having been at it for about a year.

Why? Because I had hit a wall in my beginner-to-intermediate journey where weekly lessons introduced new songs in every session, and I wasn't putting in the practice time because, well, it was hard. And I used to be a chronic hard-things-quitter.

But come 2026, I decided to adhere to my theme so I thought - what if I picked up something even harder? And I found violin. An instrument I've never touched in my life. Signed up for weekly in-person lessons.

The logic made sense to me: if I learn violin, guitar will feel easier by comparison.

Turns out I was onto something.

Violin absolutely humbled me. The bow control, the pressure, finding the right notes on each string. Playing it initially sounded like a cat being run over again and again. Thankfully I got a mute that made practice easier! But it took way longer and multiple lessons for me to get accustomed to playing it right. I was grateful for in-person lessons so my instructor could correct every mistake immediately in real-time. Plus both my teachers (guitar and violin) are the kind of strict, passionate, hilarious humans who make you want to show up and work harder. They love what they do. And I love that.

And yeah - suddenly guitar didn't feel so impossible anymore.

Now I'm doing both. Taylor Swift songs on guitar (thanks Nena Shelby for making this fun on YouTube!), violin scales and pieces with my other instructor, about 3-4 hours a week total split between them. Both liberate me similar to driving. They help me clear my head, temporarily pausing incessant thoughts and worries.

The key lesson I learned here is that "hard" is relative. A great way to make something feel manageable or easier is to deliberately do something harder alongside it.

There's this concept in psychology called "anchoring effect" - a cognitive bias faced during estimations or negotiations, where the first piece of information you encounter becomes your reference point for everything else. Violin anchored 'hard' in my brain and everything else got measured against it. So guitar looked pretty doable from there. 

Over time, hedonic adaptation kicked in - my brain got used to the difficulty. Week over week, violin started feeling less uncomfortable, so did the guitar, and the journey continues.