I mean they are if you want to do research if you want to contribute something like that that is kind of it's a nice story that's kind of the opposite of the tiger one story with someone we care about in the same way I think what what

yeah you put it better than I did okay

thank you I don't think so though but thank you um so there are so many remarkable stories in this book but there the readers the the readers the listeners are going to go have to become readers and read it themselves if they want to hear the rest of them like the story of how Fango got started um but I kind of want to talk about lesser known successes like me and my guitar I don't know um back at the beginning of the pandemic I started playing guitar and my mom and I spent a lot of time going back and forth about whether I should get lessons or not I really didn't want to I'm independent I could do it right um what advice would you have given if you were there and could have said something to me and my mom when we were having this discussion

about whether to get lessons or not I think it I think it really depends I mean I think lessons at at some point will be important not to say okay so it depends on the genre right like so I write about some of the differences between classical and jazz in range and as it turns out a lot of the best jazz players ever not only never got lessons they didn't even learn how to read music but they did a ton of playing in groups where they would kind of respond to each other and imitate one another and so so I think the question more than if you're getting formal lessons or not is like what kind of developmental environment do you have I think the I think getting lessons could help you learn sort of some of the uh the thing depending on the kind of playing that you're doing because there is you know there's a section in the book where I talk about like an eminent yeah professional guitar so also an eminent instructor and he advocates for initially letting people do some fooling around even though that will slow them down early on he likens it to language learning where you know your parents don't like start by teaching you grammar they start by throwing you in and you struggle and you learn some things and then later you learn the grammar when you're kind of perfecting it and that he says that that's like the people go the other route they sort of are really learning sort of the rigorous uh classical rules and things like that they get a head start but later on they become sort of less flexible in the things that they can learn so I think what I would want for you would be a situation where you can learn some of the basics but that you don't become like beholden to them I think that's the same thing for writing too it's like it's good at some point to know a lot of the rules but also not to be beholden to them and so I would probably have said take some lessons but interspers it with different genres of music first of all try to do different genres you're doing what's called interleaved practice which is when you're you're facing different challenges it helps you build generalized models that you can apply to anything do some things on your own try some imitation and sort of come up with particular kind of problems you have or pieces you want to learn and engage a teacher for that and but but leave some time for unstructured activity too I mean looking into looking back at that 10,000 hour the original 10,000 hours study the the best musicians spent a huge amount of time like the the things that to my eye again there was tremendous amount of individual variation but things that set them apart from the other two groups were one they slept more so you know whatever they got more sleep that's good for learning stuff and they spent a lot of time like on their own just like playing and trying on their own and so I think it's really it's really a balance I don't think there's a problem with engaging a teacher I just would make sure you have plenty of variety and also leave some time for yourself to do like semi-structured or like less structured activity what did you decide

to