Friday, November 11, 2022 by Bonnie Synhorst | Practice Tips & Tricks

Casually chatting with a teen violinist about a month back, the comment was made that “I’ve plateaued on violin and want to branch out to other instruments”.  I understand the excitement of learning new instruments and the wonderful rush of success when things are easy, but I’ve been pondering this statement for roughly the month since it was made and soul searching whether I also use empty excuses to justify my lack of progress or inability to move forward and achieve higher levels of playing. During my thought process, I came down to the bare bones of the problem:  Excuses.

How do we use excuses to justify not doing what we know we should and how does it limit us?  This morning, a student told me “it’s hard”.  Yes, playing an instrument is extremely hard!  But when we use it as an excuse, we give ourselves a pass to quit working when we fail.  Taking this attitude, allows us to only get so far and not discover our true potential.  Which makes me wonder about elite athletes as well as professional musicians, or even top professionals in any field:  science, law, technology, etc. One thing I observe with all these amazing people is that they don’t give up when they run into hurdles.  For every amazing success, there are hundreds and thousands of failures.  The proof that it CAN be done is their success.  And it should be a testament to all of us that we also can achieve anything given that we put in the effort and the work.  We only fail when we stop trying.

Through the course of the pandemic, I was just so happy that students showed up for lessons and it seemed that they often didn’t have the motivation and pure will (in some cases) to push themselves to work and push themselves when things were hard, because life itself was hard.  So in turn, we accepted mediocrity and subpar work.  Now we need to reverse the trend or our future, which is in the hands of our upcoming generations, does not look promising. 

In the studio, I ask and encourage students to do more than they think they are able.  Failing happens often on the road to success so we MUST fail in order to improve.  If we are NOT failing, we are not trying to do hard enough things.  

Oftentimes, I question how this appears in my studio to the outside world when they hear less than polished pieces and/or wrong notes.  Then I realize that those instances may very well be representative of my own struggles with failure and need to continue to work harder to help these students to succeed and not give up as they have these experiences (that I myself had as a student).  

A few days ago, I heard the statement, “the master fails more than the student ever tries.” This brings me to conclude and sum up my thoughts in the following key points:

• Try hard things

• Don’t give up

• There are no valid excuses; merely rationalizations for why we did not do.

• Fail, reflect, learn, and fail again!