Were you ever really good at anything growing up?

[FO4UR]

  

 

Hubby plays the clarinet and did okay picking up piano after college.

 

 

 

 

It was the other way around for me. I did my abrsm music theory homework in math class in elementary school. Memorizing music history was more torturous than all the maths and sciences combined. Music analysis and composition which I took in 9th grade was relatively easy. I started piano at 4.

 

 

I "picked up" piano okay for an amateur. My lack of piano skill is absolutely a killer professionally though. If I were pushed to learn piano at 8yo I would have had a different experience.  My piano teacher in college was the same as the theory...her attrition rate and demand for perfection...I graduated proficient. I could have graduated excellent.

 

The last class of college music theory was one huge analysis project. Claude Debussy. It was fascinating, but it almost killed me. I was 20yo or so...

 

Music history?  Loved it, but never had to "memorize" it.  We mostly wrote papers on composers & things like the evolution of the various instruments.

 

Music literature...now that was rather torturous.  I do not like "Drop the Needle."  

[lllll]

nm

Edited December 30, 2015 by w11

[Dmmetler]

I thought I was good at music. Best in my high school, local youth orchestras, regional and state level bands, etc.

 

Then I got to college-and discovered that "good" was more like "maybe a little better than mediocre, just one of a huge number of players who thought they could go pro".

 

I was good at music history and musicology, so decided to go that route instead, and burned out in grad school.

 

I did discover, though, that I'm pretty good-maybe not the best ever, but pretty good, at teaching kids music, especially younger ones, and I made my pre-DD career teaching Orff music at the PK-6th grade level and teaching Pre-K-3rd grade music education at the college level. It works.

 

In some ways, I think I may have gone too farthe other way, though. I was convinced I was hot stuff because I was a big fish in a small pond. I realized recently that DD is the opposite-she truly believes she's not really good at anything because she spends a lot of her time as a minnow in very, very big ponds. I'm not sure that's a good thing, either.

 

 

[fairfarmhand]

I didn't develop passion for stuff until adulthood. I was not pushed to become excellent at one thing as a child, I much preferred a broader scope of experiences. It gave me a great view of life though.

 

I don't have to tie myself to one thing. I can focus on say art or sewing for a time. Then I can focus on writing (which is where I am now).  I'm not super amazing at any of it, but I like having a huge variety of interests. Keeps life fun.

[PeacefulChaos]

As a child/teenager, I was pretty talented in music. Not a prodigy or anything like that, but enough so that I never had to work at it.

In high school I thought I was so disciplined because I went home every day, sat down at the piano, and played through my songs.

Only in adulthood did I realize that wasn't discipline - discipline would have been putting in hard work on it daily, when it consisted of more effort than 'just sitting down and playing'.