Roughly a year ago I started talking about learning to play xylophone enough that my partner looked up a list of people who might teach xylophone around town.
I was about 6 months into making my independent consulting work my primary source of income at the time, which meant learning to deal much more directly with rejection, adapting to a totally different size of client and industry, being my own sales and operations person, and just generally feeling like a noob.
People aren’t kidding. Founding things is a LOT. [Founders still aren’t special, by the way – they’re just people who have ideas and not quite enough fear to not try.]
In other words, I was not ready to be a beginner at anything else.*
So I kept playing the ukulele and tried going back to Fat Chance Bellydance style dance. Things I’m at least pretty good at.
Now I’ve been doing the work thing for what’s quickly approaching two years. Long enough to advise others on starting their own things. I’m learning in subtler ways, and making a kind of peace with the anxiety of being responsible for all my own stuff.
PERFECT TIMING TO SUCK AT SOMETHING NEW.
This week I toddled into the home studio of a drum teacher who writes and thinks kindof a lot about musical pedagogy (in other words, a huge nerd – my kind of people). He gave me a 3-ring binder like I was 12. He made a lot of incorrect assumptions about the amount of classical music theory I would remember from the piano (that amount is in fact zero, all the theory I remember I learned from Nat), handed me some mallets and unveiled a whole-ass marimba.
Marimbas are quite large. They’re large enough that you have to shift your weight a bit to play a single octave.
And I? Am once again sucking at something. I can count and read music, which means I’m not even starting from nothing, but… I’m having to learn how to hold and use sticks. Like a chimpanzee.
It’s fun enough that I’m picking up a MUCH SMALLER practice instrument tomorrow, so I can do my chimpanzee things at home. Like learning how to stand and how to hit things.
I’ll probably be pretty good at this some day.
In the meantime, I’ll enjoy the beginner’s gratification of being able to correctly play a C major scale twice in a row.
* In retrospect, I have only been anxious and never a true beginner at solopreneurship – a thing I realized in comparison to one afternoon with a marimba. Not once have I been as afraid of a startup or nonprofit’s problems and puzzles as I was of the marimba. And both are quite fun!