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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As a business owner, I often hear from friends (and friends of friends) who are headed down that path. They’re looking for advice and encouragement.

Often, I can’t help very much — we have a mismatch of values and priorities.

One woman called wanting to learn about finding commercial space for a school she hadn’t started yet. She was disappointed in my recommendation that she start humbly (for instance, leasing from a church) instead of forging ahead with a multi-year commercial lease in a high-traffic area. Her plan was to raise money, which sounded terrifying to me.

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“I just don’t remember learning this,” the student said in frustration, slumping over her math book.

My colleague could only say the truth, as absurd as it sounded. “You don’t remember learning this because you’ve…never learned it before. This is the first time.”

After a couple of years of reviewing and remediating, it was hard for this student to see that the concepts in front of her were new. It required a shift in attitude from her: Instead of a determination to persist even though she felt like she “should already know this by now,” she now had to adopt a sense of curiosity and openness to the unfamiliar.

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There are a couple of key beliefs that get in our way when we’re trying to learn something.

The first is the belief that we’re not capable. The second is the belief that it’s going to be unpleasant and time-consuming.

Even when the first is tackled, the second can cause a lot of problems. Students who are trained to be dutiful won’t question whether there’s a better way to go about the task at hand. They assume that no matter what they do, they’ll be loaded down with a bunch of boring homework to slog through, year after year.

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When I was a junior in college, I took a statistics course. I was in the midst of getting a degree in music, so it wasn’t exactly a critical class for me. However, I really tried my best.

I eventually grasped each concept. The trouble was, that didn’t happen until several days after each exam. I would study hard leading up to the test, struggle through it, and then things would click just as we were moving on to the next topic.

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Teachers my have a reputation for torturing students, but many students do just fine torturing themselves.

Underlying many of our most painful experiences in growth and learning is an unnecessary belief that, once released, opens up all kinds of possibilities.

Often unstated by adults because it might be buried a bit deeper, we can count on kids to express this belief right out loud, which helps them get over it faster.

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Every aspiring classical pianist wants to learn to play Beethoven’s “Für Elise.” Some two hundred years after its composition, it’s still irresistible. And the good news is that the well-known theme is very simple. The harmony consists of only four chords, meaning that it can be taught by rote. The hands don’t play together very much — they just overlap. In other words, you can show someone how to play it even if they don’t read music and don’t have a lot of experience.

What many people don’t realize is that “Für Elise” has two other themes that are lesser known than the iconic A-section. These parts are not for beginners.

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