Participation trophies have a bad rap.

In sports, it’s certainly reasonable that the trophies, medals, and ribbons go to the team or athlete who won. It’s a contest.

But the arts aren’t like that. Neither is entrepreneurship. Neither is learning a new skill. You win by doing it — by showing up day after day to do the work and get better. It’s not a competition. “The best” is irrelevant.

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As a young adult, I didn’t know that the music teachers who advertised in the classifieds section of the free weekly paper were the crummy ones who weren’t generating enough business through referrals.

I attended one lesson with a jazz piano teacher. Instead of teaching me new things, he spent most of the hour lecturing me on why I needed to focus. I couldn’t play guitar and piano…and if I was going to play piano, I needed to specialize. I couldn’t keep playing classical and pop and jazz. If I wanted a career in music, I needed to make a choice and go all the way with it.

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If you have tried and failed to learn how to play the guitar, the reason is simply this: One day, you put the guitar back in its case and never took it out again.

That’s how people end up not completing the online courses they signed up for: They just stop logging in.

And the diet and exercise plan…the effort to quit smoking or drinking…the new budget that will allow us to save money for once…we abandon these initiatives when life gets in the way.

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A young man had a big dream. He wanted to leave his job and create a business that would sustain him. He was afraid of failing.

I asked him how he would define failure — and success. After all, if you know what you are going for and what you’re trying to avoid, you can create a vision for the future and a map that will help you find your way.

To my surprise, he defined failure as an inability to make the business replace his day job within a tight time frame (I think it was six months).

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“Yesterday, she sat at the piano and cried,” said Angie about her nine-year-old, “and today she’s refusing to play.”

It didn’t take much to soothe Angie, despite how dire the situation seemed. I told her that I’ve cried at the piano bench many a time. It’s normal. It doesn’t mean that her daughter has had enough and should quit piano. On the contrary, it means that she really cares about what she’s doing and a breakthrough is on its way if she sticks with it.

Do we want a child to feel this level of frustration in their first six months of piano lessons? Of course not. But Angie’s daughter had been playing for more than three years. She was an accomplished player for her age who was setting big goals for herself.

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