The best investment I ever made in myself was learning to play the guitar. Because I did, I'm hardly ever bored, and I can have a lot of fun anywhere. As a younger man, it made me popular with the ladies. Now it makes me popular with the kids. It's funny how one regresses with age: Playing love songs is fun, but playing silly children's songs is a blast, especially for a grown man. Recently, someone told me, "I envy you because you can make music." This puzzled me. Why? Being able to pick the guitar (badly) and "sing" (if you can call it that) is hardly uncommon. It's not an esoteric achievement attainable only by gurus and shaman. It's not as if I was born with a guitar in my hands (although my mom used to tell me that when I was a teenager making a ruckus, teasing about what a pain I was). If you want to play an instrument and make music, take the time and learn how to do it! It's given me more joy than anything else, and I love sharing that joy with others.
Anyway, I asked the person who "envied" me why they didn't learn to play the guitar or some other instrument. Their answer left me stunned: "I'm just not musically inclined."
Huh? You're not musically inclined? If you want to play music, doesn't that make you inclined? It's not like Jimi Hendrix just picked up a guitar one day and mastered it the next. The only difference between him and you is that he spent tens of thousands of hours with his guitar. It's not like you can't learn, you just have to do the work: learn a little theory and practice, practice, practice. The only difference between someone who is "musically inclined" and someone who is not is that the musician cares enough about it to spend many rigorous hours studying.
Playing music is all about having fun, but learning to play music is all about discipline. Your fingers will ache. You'll get blisters in places you never knew existed. It will hurt your very heart to keep trying to nail that same riff and keep hitting it sour. The payoff is that eventually your trained fingers will dance lightly on your instrument as if it were an extension of your heart, and your heart will soar when you finally do nail that riff. I'll never forget the first time I played a song all the way through. It was a little (basically) two-chord Beatles song, "Eleanor Rigby." I used to love switching up the lyrics to fit the situation. Still do, actually.
My advice to anyone who has ever looked at musicians on stage and felt a twinge of envy is to commit some time and effort and learn to play. After a couple months of regular practice, you'll be good enough to jam with your buddies. After a couple years, you'll be able to jam with the pros.
Learn to play the guitar today, or stop bellyaching about how easy musicians have it!
