Talent is convenient.

It’s undeniably helpful to have early promise or natural aptitude in a particular area. We tend to enjoy things we’re good at. If you are naturally good at something, you will stick with it all the way to mastery.

However, the flip side concerns me more. If you are not naturally good at something that you really want to master, I urge you to stick with it anyway. Sooner or later, with consistent effort over time, some aspect of it will click. When you evaluate things several weeks, months, or years later, you may even find that your results are indistinguishable from the “talented” person.

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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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Jerry Seinfeld, when asked about his method for success in comedy, shared a very simple strategy: He wrote new material every day. In order to accomplish this, he drew a big red X on his wall calendar for every day he wrote. A day without an X became unthinkable.

“Don’t break the chain!” he said. In other words, keep that streak going — do whatever it takes to earn that X.

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Starting a new hobby or learning a new skill can bring on a sort of infatuation phase: You think about it all the time, even when you’re supposed to be doing other things. When you can’t actually be engaging in your new pastime, you’re watching YouTube videos or listening to podcasts about it. You can’t get enough.

And you may start to feel a little self-conscious about it. If you have big goals, however, ignore that feeling and do your thing.

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I frequently draw on my experience as a music teacher to solve problems in other subjects.

In music, the effectiveness of various learning strategies and tactics can be quickly and easily heard. Therefore, as I experimented, it became obvious which ones to keep using.

One of the most straightforward of these was simple repetition. But the key, I discovered, was to repeat something until you saw results, compressing your effort into a short period of time.

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