By Nicholas Anderson
One of the most difficult aspects of learning guitar and reaching your musical goals is overcoming frustrations. There are times, and maybe you’ve experienced them, when nothing you’re doing seems to be working. Your practice time seems to be worthless. You don’t see progress. You even feel like you’re getting worse, not better!
Every guitarist, to some degree or another, has felt this way. It’s normal to go through periods of time when it feels like you’re never going to improve.
Do not let this stop you.
You should never, ever let yourself believe the lie that what you want to accomplish is impossible. It’s one thing for other people to tell you that, it’s another for you to tell you that.
Whatever difficulties you experience, know this: they are temporary.
I’ve gone through periods of time when I thought I wasn’t making any progress when suddenly the techniques I was working on became much easier. I could play faster, more accurately, and with more ease. The scales I has memorized were in my fingers, not just in my brain. The chord tones seemed to fall in the right places all at the right time. The hours upon hours of work I had put in were paying off, and I was beginning to see it.
It’s not magic. And it’s not like suddenly every aspect of my playing was a breeze, but I could see that the hard work was paying off.
If you stick with it, it will pay off for you, too.
Anything worth doing is worth doing wrong and/or badly at first. Guitar playing fits into this category.
The truth is that no one picks up the guitar and is an instant virtuoso. It takes time, consistency, and perseverance to reach that level – or whatever level you want to be at.
Telling yourself you’ll never be good is self-sabotage, and if you tell yourself that enough, you will fulfill your own prophecy because you will kill all motivation you ever had to succeed by telling yourself you’ll never succeed.
Stop sabotaging yourself and get in the practice room. Your work will pay off.
If you want your work to pay off much faster, apply for admission.