Going All In on a Passion Is Easier Than Going a Little In

“The piano doesn’t love me today.” — Martha Argerich

Four years ago, I started training jiu-jitsu as an experiment to see if I could feel more alive. From the very first day, I planned my days around training. My weekends and travel plans revolved around competitions. I went from never having stepped onto a mat to training for hours every day.

It may sound like I’m uber disciplined, but the deciding was the hard part. Once I made the call, I found an academy, signed up, and stuck to the schedule. There’s a clear divider in my life: before jiu-jitsu and after.

So when I decided I wanted to learn piano earlier this year, I thought it would be easier. My goals were much less ambitious. I have no need to become the best. I don’t have big dreams of putting on a recital for all my family and friends. I’ve just loved piano music for as long as I can remember and wanted to learn some of my favorite songs.

I designed a lighter experiment. Consistency matters more than length of practice when it comes to learning something new, so I decided a successful week would mean practicing for ten or fifteen minutes a day, five days a week. I signed up for lessons with Carter, a patient and delightfully nerdy twenty-something just a few minutes down the road, and bought the book he recommended, Adult Piano Adventures. Compared to how frustrated I felt trying to learn chords on the guitar in junior high, practicing piano is, well, fun! And every time I catch myself putting pressure on myself, I remind myself: it’s supposed to be light. This should be easier than upending my entire life. Right?

But it hasn’t been. I’ve barely missed a jiu-jitsu session in four years, yet in four months of piano I’ve only once hit my goal of five days a week. Three is typical. Four is a good week. I’m making progress, but barely. As someone used to going all in, easing in is proving harder.

If you’ve ever tried adding something you love a little at a time, you may have run into the same thing. Here’s what I think is really going on.

It took me about three months of twice-daily training before I considered myself a jiu-jitsu athlete. I wasn’t any good yet, but I’d joined an academy, bought the gear, and could tell you the difference between spider guard and single leg X. I had teammates who knew my name and a coach who noticed when I wasn’t there. The re-organizing of my life was doing the trick. The skill, I knew, would come in time.

Contrast that to my four months of piano. I have the teacher and the books. I know where middle C is and can play most of the chords in standard pop songs. But I can’t play any songs I’m excited about yet. And other than Carter and my dad, who is the biggest music lover I know and checks in on my lessons every few weeks, I don’t have many people to talk to about it. I’m so far from believing I’m a piano player that I’m embarrassed to tell a “real” player that I’m even learning.

What’s the difference? It’s not the skill. I didn’t have much skill early on in jiu-jitsu either, and I called myself a jiu-jitsu athlete anyway. And it isn’t the community, because I don’t have a writing community, and one of the first things I tell new people is that I’m a writer.

I think what it really comes down to is whether something is up for a vote. You already know how this goes. There’s something you’ve been meaning to do more often — practice your serve, finish the outline, take out the art supplies — and you’re genuinely excited to do it. You’re not uncommitted. You fully intend to. But every time the moment arrives, you weigh it against something else and the something else wins. I’m committed to piano. I intend to play for the rest of my life. And right now, it’s the easiest thing in my life to talk myself out of.

Lighter passions are easier to negotiate. Which makes them harder to maintain.

The time I’ve given piano is ten or fifteen minutes here and there, scattered throughout the week — the only semi-protected block the small window after evening jiu-jitsu, after dinner, right as my brain stops working for the day and all I want to do is crash into bed. Technically, I can find the time. But it’s leftover time, squeezed between the things I’ve made higher priorities. Which means that when the moment comes, I often don’t have the capacity.

With jiu-jitsu, I’ve never had that problem. I knew from the very beginning it wasn’t something I could learn in a few minutes a day running on fumes, not to the level I wanted — it takes most people ten years (or more!) to get a black belt, and I wanted to be on the shorter end of that curve. So I rearranged my schedule and started training twice a day most days: once in the afternoon and once in the evening. I protect my energy around my training blocks so I can show up at my best.

We tend to think in time, not capacity. But fifteen minutes clear-headed is not the same as fifteen minutes after a long day of pouring our energy into other things. Because the light version of a passion is small, we often budget it at zero. Which means we never get to the harder questions: what state we’ll be in when we show up, what we’ll have already spent the day on, what happens when the sliver of time we’d planned for gets swallowed up by something else. Or — gasp! — when we’re just tired.

I trained in the beginner class for over a year before I worked any more advanced jiu-jitsu moves. I’d sit on a bench afterwards, watching the advanced students train, doing much cooler moves than I was learning as a white belt. Every part of me wanted to skip through the basics and get to the more exciting stuff. But I sat through them for one main reason: I knew I wanted to be in jiu-jitsu for the long haul. And I knew that meant mastering the fundamentals so I had a solid foundation to build on.

(It helped that my coach would yell “fundamentals!” at me any time he’d walk by and saw me trying some move clearly past my level.)

Contrast that to piano. I’m working through Adult Piano Adventures as fast as I can, skipping the boring parts, hoping to get straight to the fun stuff. If you’ve memorized a song starting in E minor, but you haven’t really learned the keys outside of that hand placement, you’re going to fumble every time you try to play something that starts on G. Speaking from experience.

The last time you picked up a lighter passion — a sport, an instrument, a language — did you master the fundamentals before moving on to the more exciting parts? Probably not. Unless you had a teacher who insisted on it, which is rare as an adult, you probably did what I’m doing with piano. You skipped ahead.

Which means you learned a sliver of the thing, not the thing. And every time you step outside that sliver, you’re essentially starting over. You might think you’re not making any progress. You might just think you’re bad at it. But really, you just haven’t given yourself anything solid to build on.

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So does that mean the only passions worth having are the ones we re-organize our lives around? I don’t think so. We can only go all-in on a few things in a lifetime, and a life made only of those is narrower than most of us want.

But I was wrong about what I’d signed up for. I assumed a lighter passion was the same thing scaled down — less time, less pressure, less of everything, but otherwise built the same way. It could have been. I just didn’t build it that way.

So don’t beat yourself up when you decide you want to learn to draw and a whole week goes by without you taking out your sketchpad. Nothing has gone wrong with you. Now you know why it’s happening.

You can also learn from the all-in passions without upending your entire life, if you want to. Stop leaving the session up for a vote. Account for the energy it will take, not just the minutes. And spend more time on the less exciting parts than your ego wants to.

As for me, I’m still not going to call myself a piano player. But at least now I know it isn’t because I’m bad at piano.