Oh Great, I’ve Been Doing It Wrong For Years

I just found out that after having played guitar for 17 years, I am, as my professional guitarist friend put it in his expert, highly technical vernacular, ‘holding my guitar wrong'.

It all started when I sent him a photo of an awkward chord I was struggling with, and asking if he had any tips. He sent me back a two minute video in which he cheerily explained that if you imagined the ideal way of holding a guitar as akin to gripping a point between thumb and index finger, then that was 100% not what I was doing.

I picked up my guitar and tried his way, and it was so obviously superior to mine, that I didn’t have the heart to argue the point. I also noted that a decent amount of muscle memory I had built up for the songs I’d learnt over the years would not work too well with this new way, which seemed quite unfortunate.

We like to tell ourselves that if we’ve been doing anything for a long time, than at some fairly early stage we would have got the basic problems right, otherwise they would have halted our progression.

Less appealing is the idea that we have in fact missed fundamental, simple lessons, which have then lurked in the background, hampering progress, year after year. That we would have got twice as far if we had known we were fighting with one hand behind our backs. But we didn’t. So we can’t.

In case you think this is a one off, there is more where that came from. After spending two years learning Mandarin, I discovered I had been confusing two very common sounds, zh and j. Spoken Mandarin has a small amount of different sounds, and relies on tones to distinguish between them, so getting each sound right is important.

Sadly, the two sounds were so blurred in my head, that I was hearing whole new words wrong, and even making up mnemonics based on these mistakes, thereby further entrenching them. For example, 扎啤 (zhāpí), is the word for draft beer.* Yet I heard it as jiāpí, and so thought, ‘ohh, the first word is the same as the word for house, 家 (jia), so it’s basically ‘the house beer’, that totally makes sense!’ I said that word wrong for at least a year.

Fortunately, the language got easier when I bought a smartphone and a Chinese dictionary app. For any Mandarin student who has avoided paper dictionaries, you were lucky.

*An important scholarly word.

This type of longstanding mistake can happen with anything. Earlier this year I read How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. It is mostly directed at academics, though the core point could be useful to anyone who reads anything at all. He argues that most people (me), aren’t very good at taking notes. For example, copying out quotes without the context or an explanation of why we liked them. Or taking detailed notes that can’t be easily accessed, and land up in a huge physical or digital pile which eventually gets thrown out or forgotten.

He suggests we use a more diffuse system, closer to how the brain actually works, with a web of links between them. That we take the time to paraphrase what we are reading, and then store the notes in a way where we can serendipitously combine them to come to new insights. He claims that this type of system was behind the immense productivity of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann.

Now I’ve only just started trying to adopt his system, so I can’t vouch for its effectiveness. But what struck me again was the idea that it is so horribly possible that we can be doing something as fundamental as taking notes, the wrong way. It made me think about the cost of that.

There is one obvious counter argument to all of this, so let me make it:

‘Oh come on Daniel, aren’t you overstating your case? You were able to study and take notes all these years, with decent success. Even when you were saying those words wrong in Mandarin, you could still be understood. You’ve played guitar decently and even done live performances. Maybe you aren’t doing any of these things perfectly, but there’s always room for improvement, these aren’t life-changing mistakes.’

With respect Mr Helpful Interlocuter, no. Admittedly, none of these mistakes were fatal. I would guess any of them would have had a 5-10% impact on my performance of the task. But the problem is that a 5% difference over 17 years compounds, holding one back just a little bit every time we try the task at hand, and over time, that matters. I think of where my guitar playing could be if I hadn’t given up on some of the (many) songs which were just slightly too painful or awkward to play. If I could have extended each practice session by 10 minutes because it was more comfortable. And so on. The picture of an alternate reality paints itself.

We all know how important life-long learning is. But at least when I think of it, it is always an advance into fresh pastures and frontiers, covering new subjects. It might be better to take a humbler approach, spending more time revisiting what we thought we had mastered, and not being too afraid to face up to the worrying fact: actually, we may still be holding our guitars wrong.