(Post 2 in my ongoing long slow book-writing process)
While it is possible to love making music and NOT be a musician – many tone deaf people love to sing in the shower – that’s not really what we’re talking about. It is also possible to love making music that everyone else in the world would find repulsive, such as atonal death chant polka metal. So for you readers out there who are already trying to pick my little outline apart without sticking around for all the posts, please stop. We’re talking about making music in the general sense, ie in genres that other people actually listen to.
Earlier I defined innate ability as the ability a person is born with that enables them to learn how to play an instrument more quickly and/or better than the average person. Some folks would say this sounds like “talent.” But I believe that “talent” can be faked. Talent is natural ability of a superior quality. That sounds like a generic way of saying what I just said. But when one hears a person play a guitar and the guitarist is very good, one might say “That there boy is talented.” He may not be. He may have been taking lessons for 15 years and had to work harder than anyone else to get to the point where he’s at.
Innate ability gives a person an edge when it comes to learning their instrument quickly. It can also mean that a person understands how music works more quickly, or understands how phrases can be fit together in a pleasing way more quickly. Innate ability, when used, can elevate a person above others in terms of perceived “talent.”
For those with innate ability, there can be a certain joy attached to using this ability. This makes sense. When we discover that we are good at something, the natural tendency for us is to keep doing it. But innate ability will just sit there, if the person is unmotivated or lacking in some other way.
There’s an interesting side to this. If a person has an innate ability, should she be morally obligated to use it?
We hear this a lot, and many times it goes back to theology. If one believes in God, and one believes that our mission here is to advance the human race, and one believes that God gave us all innate abilities to use, then we MUST use them. To NOT do so would be a sin against God and man. So I’m told.
There are also non-theist arguments in favor of the obligation to use innate ability. Many non-theists also believe that we should help advance the human race and that we should use our innate abilities to do so, because we owe it to future generations. Previous generations did it for us – we’re not still living in caves eating food raw. Well, some of us are.
So perhaps there’s a genetic predisposition in humans that says “If you’re born with the ability to do something that is beyond what the average person can do, it’s your duty to use your ability to advance mankind.” That could be the case. Whether we’re genetically preprogrammed by God or by random chance, the preprogramming is perhaps there.
But… isn’t it our own damn choice? We live our own lives. We make choices. We decide. Suppose I have an innate ability in an area where I have zero interest? Why should I be obligated to use it? What if I have a lesser innate ability in a different area that I enjoy more? Should I not be able to pursue that instead?
I’m going to argue that yes, you should be able to choose your own path to happiness. It is not, in my opinion, your “mission” in life to find your innate abilities and base your life around them. However, I strongly believe that you SHOULD find your innate abilities, as early on as you can, because there’s a very good chance that you’re going to enjoy doing activities that your innate ability makes easier. But base your life around it? Only if you want to. And this is where things get ironic. We ask people to choose their career, their life’s work, at the age of 18. And that’s just batshit crazy. That’s why most people in modern times end up with 20 different careers over the course of their lives. We don’t know what we want to be when we grow up even after we grow up.
Music is the perfect example of something a person could be good at but NOT want to pursue as a career, for a number of reasons. I’ll cover that in a later chapter. But discovering one’s innate abilities is still important, especially in the area of music, because while it may not make an outstanding career for everyone, it can make an excellent hobby. The same can be said about athletics.
How do you know if you’ve got an innate musical ability? Simple – it’s in the ease of learning and doing.
Ah, but it’s trickier than that. Isn’t it? “The ease of learning” is not bound by time. Suppose you and I both decide we’re going to learn violin. And we’re both musicians. We both start at the same time. You take lessons from a teacher for a year, force yourself to practice a lot, and after one year you can play decently enough to do the violin solo from “Dust In The Wind.” I take lessons from a teacher for a year, and by the end of the year I’m nowhere near at the level you’re at. It takes me another year to get that good. But where you have had to force yourself to practice, I’ve really enjoyed the process of learning.
It was EASIER for me to learn, but it took LONGER.
See how ease of learning is not bound to time?
Now you begin to see how things overlap. Remember, the list I gave you was:
1. Innate ability
2. Creativity
3. Work Ethic
4. Desire
5. Logic
So in the above case, my Desire is helping my innate ability, whereas your Work Ethic is helping yours. None of these items live in isolation. But in order for either of us to succeed, we have to have at least some raw innate ability. Violin is a challenging instrument to learn to play well.
Innate ability, then, in its raw form, can exist in differing amounts. Mozart, who learned to play harpsichord at 3 months, had more innate ability than I do. But I wouldn’t trade places with him. Who’d want to be dead? And no, it wasn’t really 3 months. Look, if I have to explain my humour all the way through this book, I’m going to get bored, OK? So just follow me next time. Sorry – sometimes I type with a British accent.
Having a lot of innate ability will make things easier. In some ways, it can also make things more difficult. In the field of gifted education, there’s a term they use called multipotentiality. You can guess what it means. It means that you have potential to do many different things well, which can sometimes lead to not doing anything – because you don’t know what you WANT to do. Having a lot of innate ability to learn new instruments or write songs or whatever can work against you if you lack focus. We’d all love to play the drums (those of us who already don’t,) but if you’ve got an hour per night to “do” music, maybe it’s not the best thing to do. Unless someone gives you a sweet drum set or something.
We all have different levels of innate ability.
Anyone reading this series is likely frustrated by now. Blog posts are supposed to be short tidy essays with all three courses of the meal. What the hell is this thing you’re reading? It’s called a book, and I’m blogging it a little bit at a time. When it’s all finished, I’ll sell it online for like 5 bucks or some other small amount.
NEXT TOPIC – Creativity.
