I mean, hopefully, one day I’ll be writing a blog post titled, “Wild, Crazy Success and How to Achieve It.” And truthfully, I generally feel perfectly happy and successful in my personal life and usually in my professional life as well. But some days just seem like big, ugly blots. Apparently, I like to talk about those days.

Last week at my daughters’ piano recital, I noticed something. When the younger students (you know the sweet little “Hot Cross Buns” students) played, some of them played their pieces perfectly. Every note was correct and well placed. It was darling of course, and the thrilled look when they were finished and stood to take a bow, or stare doe-eyed at the audience. I just loved that. However, I noticed that when many of the older, more experienced students played, there were mistakes. Oh, nothing horrible, but definitely mistakes. In every single more advanced piece that the more advanced musicians played. And when they stood and bowed, I knew they knew it; they knew they’d made a few mistakes. They knew their performances hadn’t been perfect. They may have been pleased (or not), but they knew they weren’t perfect. And I expect that the more advanced the performer, the more acutely they feel that failure, the more it hurt, or seemed it shouldn’t be there at all. And I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Many untrained ears in the audience may not have even noticed the mistakes, but they were there. The harder the song, the more beautiful and profound, the greater chance for mistakes, the greater the chance for failure. 

Which is how it is for us all. If we spend our lives playing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and not going much past that, well, there’s a decent little chance that we’ll manage to perfect that song, that we’ll be able to play it in any circumstances and even under pressure. But if we move past it, into waltzes and marches, and then into Pachelbel’s Canon and Beethovan’s Fifth and Gershwin’s Rhapsody and Blue, we’re going to mess up a time or two. I always tell my piano students that there are no perfect performances; there are just musicians who recover well and keep going. And it’s true. It’s so so true.

It’s true with writing too. If we stay where we’re comfortable and safe. If we stay forever with the “easy stuff” (which wasn’t easy at the beginning, but becomes so), then we might not “fail” but we probably won’t really succeed either.

We’ll never be grand musicians or great writers without CONTINUALLY pushing past our comfort zones to a place where we’ll definitely hit a foul note here or there, maybe sometimes have to stop and go back a few measures to re-group. We’ll try to be prepared; we’ll practice hard. But even then, our fingers will tremble and a few errors will creep in. Our timing might be off. Our chords might crash along where they shouldn’t have. But as we push past our comfort zone, our song will still be so much more beautiful than the one we didn’t play.

Because you can only play “From a Wigwam” so many times in life before you need to move on to something new. Now, somebody make me a meme for that.