For the past month, all I've been able to talk about with my friends is how I've started playing the piano again. I've been playing so much that it's become an obsession. When I wake up, it's what I most look forward to. I've been playing an average of between 1–2 hours each day and I would honestly keep going if I didn’t stop myself.1 It has been such an incredible source of joy, the sort that I haven't had in a long time.

My humble piano

To give some context, I never really learnt to play the piano. I took lessons when I was young for a year but stopped after that because I would always fall asleep when I was supposed to be practising. So before a month ago, I did know how to play the piano in theory, and have occasionally played a few bars here and there of music that was stuck in my head but never really committed to learning properly. I was, for all intents and purposes, a beginner piano player.

Last month was just like every other time I had played the piano. The only difference was that I kept playing the next day, and the next, and the next, and so on until today.2 In fact, the very piece that I was playing was one that I already had the sheet music to, from the last time I attempted to learn it.

Learning to play the piano has given me immense satisfaction and fulfilment because of the insane amount of progress I've been able to make. Every single day for the first two weeks I was levelling up in my piano skills. It's quite rare to experience making so much progress as an adult in such a short span of time. This, I think is the crux of my satisfaction. Yes, I do love playing the piano, but I think the joy of improvement is even greater than that.

What has really made this an incredible experience is, taking everything I know as an adult about learning and music to accelerate my progress to the point where after two weeks, I surpassed the skills of a year's worth of progress for my 8-year-old self. With this in mind, I highly encourage you to pick up a new skill from scratch and start learning it. Especially if you haven't learnt any new skills as an adult. The experience is totally different from when you were a child. I would recommend picking something you have some familiarity with, and has a very low barrier to entry, but most of all, something that you absolutely love doing. I suggest looking at the extracurricular activities that kids embark on. If you do pick up something, let me know, I'd love to hear about it.

For myself, it was simple. I wanted to play the song All This Time - One Republic. This was a good choice for a number of reasons.

• I love the song

• I love the piano part of the song enough to want to play it myself

• The piano part is easy enough for me to learn it as a beginner

• I know enough about playing the piano to teach myself how to play

All four factors are somewhat essential for learning a new skill as an adult (the latter can be substituted with a coach or teacher). Without this specific concoction, I don't think you'll be dedicated enough to make it past the initial hurdle, or at the very least, it will be much less likely. With learning new skills, there's a learning curve that you have to get over for it to be sustainable. If you don't make it over it, the skill isn't going to stick. It's a bit like launching a rocket into space, you need enough fuel to get into orbit. Once you make it past that point, you're fine. Getting there is the tough part, and that takes pure determination. There's no way around it. It's not going to be easy, so that's why you need enough motivation to start off with. For me with the piano, playing two different parts with two hands was the biggest challenge for me. That's what stopped me all the previous times.

If you’ve enjoyed reading so far, consider subscribing to receive new posts and show your support :)

Here's the approach I took for learning the piano, some of which can be applied generally, and some that is specific to music/piano.

I already knew how to read sheet music for the piano but am very slow at it. Being slow doesn't matter, because as long as I can read it, I can play it and memorise it. I've also got prior musical experience with playing the trumpet to which I've attained an intermediate level. These prior skills helped with identifying a good song to learn. All This Time mostly consists of chords being played in a regular manner. The chords also repeat themselves so there's not actually that much you have to learn to be able to play a large chunk of it.

I started off with learning to play the right hand. Playing one chord is trivial. Next is learning how to play a whole bar of the right hand. Then two bars of the right hand. At each stage I repeat at least three times without making a mistake so that I know it well enough to move on to the next step. If I make a mistake, the counter resets and I start again.

What I'm doing is breaking up one complex activity (playing a song) into the smallest units of actions that I can learn and keep practising until I nail it. Once I've perfected it, I can move on to learning the next step. My brain can only take so much, so atomic increments is the way to go. If you're learning a skill other than the piano, you'll want to break down the activity into atomic increments to learn as effectively as possible. For me it was fairly intuitive how to do this for piano given my prior experience but the same might not be true for you.

Here's how I've broken down playing a piano song into atomic increments (I'm probably missing things further up the skill tree since I haven't gotten that far):

• Able to play with the right hand

• Able to play with the left hand

• Able to play with both hands simultaneously

• Able to play with both hands simultaneously at the right speed (verified by playing along to the song)

• Able to play the previous phrase and continue playing the new bars without slowing down

• Able to play with both hands and the pedal

• Able to play with both hands with my eyes closed

• Able to play with both hands, pedal, and sing

Some of the increments can be learned in parallel, meaning, it doesn't matter which order you do them in. I learn between 1-2 bars at a time, going through at least the first five atomic increments. If there's repetition, I'll learn more bars. The goal is to put enough strain on my brain to make progress, but not to overwhelm it. As I've already mentioned, I'll do each step until I get a perfect combo of three before moving on.

With learning any skill, it's important that you use spaced repetition so that you don't forget what you've learned earlier. That's why at the start of my piano practice I always play what I learnt yesterday a few times before learning some new music. Another important thing that shouldn't be overlooked is tying the newly learnt bars back with the previous few bars. A song is one sequential unit so it's important to know how to play bars in the right order. It's no use knowing how to play each individual bar of the song but not knowing the order they should be played in. The nice thing is that you don't *need* to start all the way from the beginning of the song (although that's helpful as well) but you only need to how the previous phrase connects to it. Because at any given moment, you only need to know how to play the next note when you're playing the piano. You don't need to plan far ahead in advance. Kind of like how an LLM thinks hehe.

I must confess that my progress and enthusiasm has waned over the past week but I blame transcribers for that. So halfway through learning All This Time, I noticed that there are some transcription errors. No matter how hard I look, I can't find any better sheet music online. You see, All This Time isn't that popular, and I specifically just want to play the piano accompaniment, without the melody, which most sheet music includes.

I want to play the piano part exactly like how it was played in the studio recording, which turns out to be quite difficult to find! In my refusal to learn the incorrect sheet music, I have halted progress in learning All This Time and have moved onto other songs. I don't know why every single piece of sheet music I’ve found has had a mistake. It's infuriating. It shouldn't take much effort for a trained ear to notice when the notes they've transcribed are incorrect. I'm not trained in recognising notes and even I notice. Transcription errors are the bane of me.

I decided that I want to learn somewhat overlooked music by pop artists that you probably won't know unless you've listened to their whole album. That way I can play the songs for other people and they will get to enjoy a new song, AND can't compare my performance to what they know :D. I've put together a list of songs that I want to learn, an album if you will. I'm calling this my sad boy autumn period; name adapted from Taylor Swift's All Too Well (sad girl autumn version). I'm quite fond of sad songs, and songs where the piano is the star instrument besides the voice, tend to learn towards the sad variety. You're welcome to view the playlist over here: sad boy autumn period.

If you've made it this far then you might be wondering why I've titled this post eudaimonia. Well the word comes from the ancient greek idea of happiness and flourishing.3 Although probably not a perfect fit, this word is what best encapsulates what I've experienced, the joy of learning and play.

1

I take the weekend as rest days which I play for < 1 hour.

2

This totally caught me off guard. This was probably at least the 15th time I've dabbled with the piano since I stopped learning it as a child and for some reason it finally stuck. I'm not sure what to make of this.

3

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides a description of the concept of eudaimonia.

Thank you for reading Meditations. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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For the past month, all I've been able to talk about with my friends is how I've started playing the piano again. I've been playing so much that it's become an obsession. When I wake up, it's what I most look forward to. I've been playing an average of between 1–2 hours each day and I would honestly keep going if I didn’t stop myself.1 It has been such an incredible source of joy, the sort that I haven't had in a long time.

My humble piano

To give some context, I never really learnt to play the piano. I took lessons when I was young for a year but stopped after that because I would always fall asleep when I was supposed to be practising. So before a month ago, I did know how to play the piano in theory, and have occasionally played a few bars here and there of music that was stuck in my head but never really committed to learning properly. I was, for all intents and purposes, a beginner piano player.

Last month was just like every other time I had played the piano. The only difference was that I kept playing the next day, and the next, and the next, and so on until today.2 In fact, the very piece that I was playing was one that I already had the sheet music to, from the last time I attempted to learn it.

Learning to play the piano has given me immense satisfaction and fulfilment because of the insane amount of progress I've been able to make. Every single day for the first two weeks I was levelling up in my piano skills. It's quite rare to experience making so much progress as an adult in such a short span of time. This, I think is the crux of my satisfaction. Yes, I do love playing the piano, but I think the joy of improvement is even greater than that.

What has really made this an incredible experience is, taking everything I know as an adult about learning and music to accelerate my progress to the point where after two weeks, I surpassed the skills of a year's worth of progress for my 8-year-old self. With this in mind, I highly encourage you to pick up a new skill from scratch and start learning it. Especially if you haven't learnt any new skills as an adult. The experience is totally different from when you were a child. I would recommend picking something you have some familiarity with, and has a very low barrier to entry, but most of all, something that you absolutely love doing. I suggest looking at the extracurricular activities that kids embark on. If you do pick up something, let me know, I'd love to hear about it.

For myself, it was simple. I wanted to play the song All This Time - One Republic. This was a good choice for a number of reasons.

• I love the song

• I love the piano part of the song enough to want to play it myself

• The piano part is easy enough for me to learn it as a beginner

• I know enough about playing the piano to teach myself how to play

All four factors are somewhat essential for learning a new skill as an adult (the latter can be substituted with a coach or teacher). Without this specific concoction, I don't think you'll be dedicated enough to make it past the initial hurdle, or at the very least, it will be much less likely. With learning new skills, there's a learning curve that you have to get over for it to be sustainable. If you don't make it over it, the skill isn't going to stick. It's a bit like launching a rocket into space, you need enough fuel to get into orbit. Once you make it past that point, you're fine. Getting there is the tough part, and that takes pure determination. There's no way around it. It's not going to be easy, so that's why you need enough motivation to start off with. For me with the piano, playing two different parts with two hands was the biggest challenge for me. That's what stopped me all the previous times.

If you’ve enjoyed reading so far, consider subscribing to receive new posts and show your support :)

Here's the approach I took for learning the piano, some of which can be applied generally, and some that is specific to music/piano.

I already knew how to read sheet music for the piano but am very slow at it. Being slow doesn't matter, because as long as I can read it, I can play it and memorise it. I've also got prior musical experience with playing the trumpet to which I've attained an intermediate level. These prior skills helped with identifying a good song to learn. All This Time mostly consists of chords being played in a regular manner. The chords also repeat themselves so there's not actually that much you have to learn to be able to play a large chunk of it.

I started off with learning to play the right hand. Playing one chord is trivial. Next is learning how to play a whole bar of the right hand. Then two bars of the right hand. At each stage I repeat at least three times without making a mistake so that I know it well enough to move on to the next step. If I make a mistake, the counter resets and I start again.

What I'm doing is breaking up one complex activity (playing a song) into the smallest units of actions that I can learn and keep practising until I nail it. Once I've perfected it, I can move on to learning the next step. My brain can only take so much, so atomic increments is the way to go. If you're learning a skill other than the piano, you'll want to break down the activity into atomic increments to learn as effectively as possible. For me it was fairly intuitive how to do this for piano given my prior experience but the same might not be true for you.

Here's how I've broken down playing a piano song into atomic increments (I'm probably missing things further up the skill tree since I haven't gotten that far):

• Able to play with the right hand

• Able to play with the left hand

• Able to play with both hands simultaneously

• Able to play with both hands simultaneously at the right speed (verified by playing along to the song)

• Able to play the previous phrase and continue playing the new bars without slowing down

• Able to play with both hands and the pedal

• Able to play with both hands with my eyes closed

• Able to play with both hands, pedal, and sing

Some of the increments can be learned in parallel, meaning, it doesn't matter which order you do them in. I learn between 1-2 bars at a time, going through at least the first five atomic increments. If there's repetition, I'll learn more bars. The goal is to put enough strain on my brain to make progress, but not to overwhelm it. As I've already mentioned, I'll do each step until I get a perfect combo of three before moving on.

With learning any skill, it's important that you use spaced repetition so that you don't forget what you've learned earlier. That's why at the start of my piano practice I always play what I learnt yesterday a few times before learning some new music. Another important thing that shouldn't be overlooked is tying the newly learnt bars back with the previous few bars. A song is one sequential unit so it's important to know how to play bars in the right order. It's no use knowing how to play each individual bar of the song but not knowing the order they should be played in. The nice thing is that you don't *need* to start all the way from the beginning of the song (although that's helpful as well) but you only need to how the previous phrase connects to it. Because at any given moment, you only need to know how to play the next note when you're playing the piano. You don't need to plan far ahead in advance. Kind of like how an LLM thinks hehe.

I must confess that my progress and enthusiasm has waned over the past week but I blame transcribers for that. So halfway through learning All This Time, I noticed that there are some transcription errors. No matter how hard I look, I can't find any better sheet music online. You see, All This Time isn't that popular, and I specifically just want to play the piano accompaniment, without the melody, which most sheet music includes.

I want to play the piano part exactly like how it was played in the studio recording, which turns out to be quite difficult to find! In my refusal to learn the incorrect sheet music, I have halted progress in learning All This Time and have moved onto other songs. I don't know why every single piece of sheet music I’ve found has had a mistake. It's infuriating. It shouldn't take much effort for a trained ear to notice when the notes they've transcribed are incorrect. I'm not trained in recognising notes and even I notice. Transcription errors are the bane of me.

I decided that I want to learn somewhat overlooked music by pop artists that you probably won't know unless you've listened to their whole album. That way I can play the songs for other people and they will get to enjoy a new song, AND can't compare my performance to what they know :D. I've put together a list of songs that I want to learn, an album if you will. I'm calling this my sad boy autumn period; name adapted from Taylor Swift's All Too Well (sad girl autumn version). I'm quite fond of sad songs, and songs where the piano is the star instrument besides the voice, tend to learn towards the sad variety. You're welcome to view the playlist over here: sad boy autumn period.

If you've made it this far then you might be wondering why I've titled this post eudaimonia. Well the word comes from the ancient greek idea of happiness and flourishing.3 Although probably not a perfect fit, this word is what best encapsulates what I've experienced, the joy of learning and play.

1

I take the weekend as rest days which I play for < 1 hour.

2

This totally caught me off guard. This was probably at least the 15th time I've dabbled with the piano since I stopped learning it as a child and for some reason it finally stuck. I'm not sure what to make of this.

3

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides a description of the concept of eudaimonia.

Thank you for reading Meditations. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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