Serguey Asael Shinder – IT Professional

by Serguey Shinder

There was a passage in a piece I loved that I could not play, and for the better part of a year I dealt with it by not dealing with it. I’d play the piece from the top, enjoy the parts I was good at, hit the hard bar, stumble through it in a smear of approximate notes, and keep going as if nothing had happened. It felt like practice. It sounded, from a distance, like I was working on the piece. I wasn’t. I was working on everything except the one thing that needed the work.

The truth I was avoiding is that every time I played that bar badly and moved on, I was practicing playing it badly. Repetition doesn’t care whether you’re doing the thing right. It just carves in whatever you actually do. So I was spending a year getting more and more fluent at the wrong version, reinforcing the exact stumble I wanted to lose.

What finally changed it was embarrassingly simple, and I’d known it the whole time. I stopped playing the piece. I took just the hard bar, a couple of beats of music, and played it alone, absurdly slowly, so slowly it barely counted as music. Ugly and correct beat fast and wrong. I did that over and over, at a speed where I couldn’t fail, and then nudged it faster only when my hands stopped being scared.

Within a week, the bar I’d avoided for a year was fine. Not perfect, but fine, and improving. All those months of playing the whole piece had done almost nothing for it, and a few focused sessions on the isolated hard part had done almost everything. The lesson landed with a little sting: I hadn’t lacked practice time. I’d spent all my practice time hiding from the part that mattered.

I catch myself doing the same thing far outside music. Rehearsing the parts of a job I’m already good at because they feel productive and safe, while the genuinely hard, genuinely important part sits untouched because facing it is uncomfortable. Progress almost never lives in the comfortable measures. It lives in the one bar you keep smearing past, the one your hands avoid, waiting for you to finally slow down and face it.

– Serguey Asael Shinder