The other day, I felt like playing hooky.

It was just past 10:00 AM and I had completed my planned tasks for the morning. For fifteen minutes, I scrounged for things to do, but I didn’t want to do any of the things I turned up.

An hourly employee gets paid for that kind of “in between work,” in which you are technically at work but not really doing anything. However, as a business owner, I do not. I realized that there was no reason to sit at my desk. I wanted to go outside and play, and I could.

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When I was a freshman in college, my vocal instructor was about to accompany me on one of the Schubert Lieder when he suddenly turned around and asked me how old I was.

“Nineteen,” I said.

"When Franz Schubert was nineteen, he’d already written a hundred songs,” said my instructor pointedly. “How many songs have you written?” He lifted an eyebrow and gave a self-satisfied smile, then commenced the tune without waiting for an answer.

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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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Ambitious music students always have a “dream” song that they want to learn to play.

There’s usually a piece of it that the teacher can introduce early on, but mastery is sometimes a long way off. The student could spend the next six months practicing that piece of music every day and working on it at every lesson, and it would still sound awkward and amateurish.

As the teacher in such a situation, I guide the student to spend those six months playing a bunch of other, easier songs. Instead of putting all of our effort into one song that won’t showcase the student’s growing ability very well, we play dozens, refining some to a high level of polish and allowing others to stay works-in-progress.

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“How long does it take to learn to play the guitar?”

I get this question all the time. Wanna guess what the answer is?

You guessed it: It depends. It takes a few weeks to a few years to become proficient, depending on how much effort you put in.

I also frequently get the question, “How long does it take to get good at the guitar?”

Now that is a really different question. The answer, for anyone asking it, is you never will.

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