How I Taught Myself The Piano Aged 16

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5 years ago

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How I taught myself to play the piano at 16. -----| A Thread 👇 |-----

I wasn't interested in learning to play Bach's Symphony or Mozart's Requiem. I just wanted to play my favourite song.

I didn't have a piano at home, but fortunately, there was a baby grand piano at my school.

Most of my friends were guitarists, so I didn't have much of a reference point or any idea of where to start. Nonetheless, I did.

Every day after school, I'd go and play the piano for at least an hour. At least, I tried. I learned by watching videos on YouTube and listening to the song over and over.

After day 3, I could roughly play the intro. Even then I messed up a lot. But I didn't stop. There were so many helpful videos and resources on the internet that I couldn't stop. twitter.com/treasure__n/status/1344352092341858305

I wanted to spend every spare moment playing the piano. Before long, I could play the song with relative ease. Then I learned another song. And then another. Then another.

From not knowing the first thing about the piano, I'd learned how to play a few songs within weeks. Am I better than Mozart ever was? Well, I'd like to think so, but I have a feeling that no one else would agree. In the immortal words of Kanye West, "I guess we'll never know."

Since graduating from high school, I haven't been playing nearly as much as I used to, but I'm still confident enough in my ability that I could sit down at an airport piano and tickle the ivories.

Learning a new skill in the 21st century is orders of magnitude easier than it was at any point in history. If you apply these 3 principles to your learning, there is no reason why you cannot acquire any skill:

1. Plan to Learn. I played (or rather created a cacophony) for no less than an hour in the first 3 weeks that I learned to play. In that hour, I may as well not have even existed because I devoted that time to learning the piano.

2. Set Clear Goals. Set your goals in terms of the outcome, not the means. My goal was never to learn the piano. It was always to play my 𝘧𝘢𝘷𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘦 song on the piano. The goal was clear from the beginning.

By aiming for the outcome (learning my favourite song), I attained the means (playing the piano).

3. Stick Your Goals When I first started playing, my hands didn't do what I wanted them to do. If I had changed the goal (to learning a different song), then I would never have made any progress, and would never know how to play the piano.

It all boils down to The Goldilocks Principle: The learning project needs to be challenging enough to demand focus, but easy enough to make consistent progress. If you apply these things to your learning endeavours, you can learn anything.

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