TUNING UP
Nip It in the Bud: No Excuses and No Regrets
BY SHAWN HAMMOND
@PG_shawnh
I
n terms of personal achievement and fulfillment, one of the
most perplexing tragedies of life is the ease with which we
tend to give up on what means the most to us. I’m not talking
about love, family, friends, or principles. That we prioritize those is
a given. No, what I’m talking about is our propensity to abandon
grand visions—plans for doing wonderful, exciting things.
But when I say “grand visions,” I don’t mean stuff that other
people consider huge—stuff like going to med school, climbing
Everest, playing Madison Square Garden, or whatever. It’s
much more intimate than that: It’s the stuff that’s huge to us as
individuals but that often gets clandestinely stabbed in the heart on
the altar of mutated, 21st-century notions of success. The problem
is insidious—on the surface, the dreams that are dying can seem
trivial because of our tendency to think things worth doing are always related to money, image, or status.
Of course, we don’t plan it that way. We’re not that simplistic and powerless. And yet our abandoned
aspirations still often die a long, slow death by procrastination, perfectionism, and/or self-delusion. We
never say, “I’m going to spend XX years longing for this while passively waiting for a series of perfect
scenarios to emerge, only to slowly forget the dream.” Instead, it’s a stealth mission carried out by
subconscious insecurities, misplaced priorities, and overly patient optimism. We always think there’s
time tomorrow, or this weekend, or when X, Y, and Z happen. Then, before we know it, we’ve lost days,
weeks, months, or years to inaction. And the longer we fool ourselves, the harder it is to press the “Play”
button on the old aspirations.
It can happen to any sort of mini personal dream, too—yearning to learn a particular foreign language
that’s always captivated us, vowing to break a familial cycle of never travelling abroad, learning to
skydive. But for musicians the problem can be much more subtle, though often even more tragic, given
how deep our love for music goes.
Are you preventing your playing from reaching levels that would attract the sorts of bandmates you
hope for because it’s too easy to watch tons of TV, game all night, or do way too much social-media
B.S.? Is your lifelong passion for guitar withering before your eyes because you ju 7B6