Learning the Difference Between Excuses and Limitations
One of my most transformational piano lesson moments came several years ago during a coaching session with pianist and author Paul Roberts. I’d rushed the tempo in a passage, he asked me to play it again, and after I finished performing it a second time, he commented,
“You can play in time. Why don’t you?”
When I answered that I had a tendency to rush, he replied, “Well, that’s a choice you’re making.”
In that moment I knew I’d heard a powerful truth—that I was choosing to hang on to this perceived weakness in my playing—and, knowing it was a choice and not a fatal flaw, I no longer felt at the mercy of it. Paul’s observation transformed my playing, and became a lens through which I began to view all aspects of my musicianship, as well as the rest of my life.
One of the most challenging things about being a musician is learning the difference between excuses and limitations. It’s difficult to sort one from the other because when our excuses are deeply embedded, they hinder us as powerfully as any true limitation. Furthermore, even when we uncover our excuses, it can be a struggle to let go of them. They may annoy us, but we take some hidden comfort in them, or else we wouldn’t continue to embrace them.
Excuses are human, and I can say (without false humility) that I’ve embraced enough of them to admit I’m more human than most. One of the most deeply-rooted was my “90%” excuse. I’d work like mad to learn a piece and then not do the final 10% of the work needed in order to really own the music. Sometimes I got away with it in my performances; many times I didn’t. But what kept me ensnared in this self-defeating pattern was my underlying fear that if I did the final 10% of the work—did my absolute best—how would I survive if I failed? At least if I failed when I’d learned 90% of the piece, I could console myself with the belief that I’d have succeeded if I’d practiced harder. And under that story lay another: if I never really gave music my best, I’d never have to find the limits of my ability. What finally freed me from this self-defeating behavior was knowing that when I reach the end of my life, I’d rather look back on a few spectacular failures than a whole bunch of wistful “what ifs?”.
Excuses are powerful because most of them contain a germ of truth that we amplify (and embrace) because they offer an illusion of safety. They allow us to avoid going through the pain of looking at ourselves truthfully and committing to real change. At the deepest level, we use excuses when we prefer to shift blame (subtly or not) from ourselves to something external. And so we continue to self-sabotage. We blame past teachers. We blame parents. We blame the economy. We blame the music industry. We blame everyone but ourselves. Rather than looking at the patterns in our own lives and practice habits, we cozy up to our excuses and we don’t learn. We don’t grow.
Ironically, the only way to find our true limitations is through challenging our excuses. When I examined my choice to rush the tempo, I discovered that it was rooted in an old, outdated belief that I couldn’t play fast enough. The antidote was to slow down and breathe. Real limitations existed behind my 90% excuse. As I chose to prepare to the best of my ability, I learned that I wasn’t a perfect pianist, and I sure wasn’t a world-class pianist, but this didn’t excuse me from pushing myself to be the best pianist I could be. Today, even when I don’t play as well as I might wish, I gain satisfaction from knowing I’ve done my best.
Eradicating our excuses is rarely a “one-and-done” (or even 20-and-done) situation. I still uncover these niggling little lies lingering in the things I tell myself when I practice. But now, rather than letting an excuse live rent-free in my mind, I’ve learned to question it. These questions push me out of unproductive comfort zones and bring freedom and curiosity to my playing. In this excuse-free, judgment-suspended zone, musical challenges are puzzles to be solved, not indictments of my worth as a pianist. It is in this space that limitations stop being impediments and become gracious boundaries within which to create moments of beauty.