I LOVE this analogy! I'm keeping it and will definitely remind myself "one turn at a time" when I'm feeling hopelessly incompetent.About 30 years ago, my brother Ken talked me into going skiing with him. The idea of trying to learn (and possibly fail at) something new terrified me, but the image of me skiing down a mountain effortlessly is something I also found intriguing, and I agreed to go -- with very mixed feelings.
I remember feeling totally nauseous as we took the chair lift up to the top of our first hill. And when I stepped off of that slow-moving chair, I immediately skied directly into a snow bank, since I had no idea how to turn a pair of skis. Ken decided that was a good place to begin my lessons -- how to turn. He demonstrated how to snow plow, and I was able to follow him.
Then we moved over to the top of the hill. And while it may have been a bunny slope, I felt as if I were standing on the top of Everest. I looked down the entire length of the mountain, and my knees started knocking, and I said, "I can't ski this! The mountain is too big!" What he said next surprised me; he said, "It doesn't matter how big the mountain is because you're only go to ski one turn, and then stop."
So I pushed off, snow plowed through one turn, then stopped. He skied over to me and said, "Now that you know you can do that once, you can do that again." And I pushed off, made another turn, and stopped. And then did it again for a third time. And again and again -- until, pretty soon, I was at the bottom of the hill.
What I learned from that day, and it has stuck with me ever since then, is that everything that's worth doing is difficult and potentially scary and might seem like an insurmountable mountain to be conquered. But, in reality, it's just one turn at a time. Remembering that has come in handy in my career as a writer, where I often face mountainous projects like book manuscripts or screenplays -- projects that look like Everest until I realize that every book manuscript begins with a single sentence. And then the next one. And the one after that. Until I've metaphorically skied the entire mountain.
I try to apply that to guitar playing, too. I remember back at the beginning of my playing, I'd listen to songs like Eva Cassidy's "Autumn Leaves" or Queen's "Love of My Life", and I could never imagine playing such huge and daunting songs. And then I thought about Ken's "one turn at a time" philosophy, and I decided to make my goal to learn only the first measure. I'd practice that for a solid day until I could comfortably play it, then I'd turn to the second measure, and learn that one, too. Then I'd link these two turns together. And pretty soon I'd be at the end of the song.
I have enough experience now to realize that if I apply Ken's philosophy to just about any song (or any daunting activity), I'll eventually be able to learn it. A song isn't Everest. It's a series of notes that make up a measure, and a series of measures that make up a song. One turn at a time.
Thanks den. Thanks Tony