This article will focus on how learning about yourself and your motivations can give you a focused path to reaching your goals as a guitar player, and sustain you along the way. Self understanding is the key to maintaining reasonable expectations, and helps you to realize why you are spending your time practicing and playing.

Socrates instructed his contemporaries to “know thyself” well over two thousand years ago. In today’s fast paced society, we often don’t take the time to really get to know ourselves. When it comes to deciding on playing a musical instrument, people often don’t clearly establish for themselves why they want to play, and more importantly what they would like to specifically be able to accomplish on an instrument. And because they haven’t taken the time to understand their reasons, or determined what it will take to reach a specific goal, they often quit and think they have wasted their time.

Now, when I talk about knowing yourself, I’m not talking about shutting yourself off from the world and becoming a hermit meditating on top of a mountain, or about going to a therapist to figure out why you incessantly bite your fingernails. The kind of self knowledge I want to discuss is understanding your reasons for pursuing something, and clearly defining why it is important to you. What draws you towards engaging in a particular activity or hobby, such as learning to play the guitar?

Usually the first lesson I have with new students who are just beginning on the guitar is a question and answer session to find out about the student. Having the student voice their reasons, inspirations, and expectations for learning the guitar helps us develop a set of goals and a lesson plan for achieving them. If the student has no clear idea why they want to play the guitar, or what they want to be able to do on the instrument, I have found that the student’s chances of sticking with it are considerably smaller.

Here are the questions that I pose to students, and ones that I have sought to answer for myself as well:

• What is it about the guitar that makes you feel it is the instrument for you?
• Who is an inspiration to you in pursuing to play music?
• What would you ultimately like to be able to do or play on the guitar?

These questions are designed to establish why you connect with the guitar, help you define a direction, and develop a set of goals that will allow you to succeed.

Gene Simmons from Kiss cited seeing the Beatles play, and watching the swooning reactions from the female audience as his original motivation for playing bass and forming a band. Whether that’s a good reason or not, the rest is history.

My original motivation was as a teenager, seeing a friend’s older brother jamming with his band, and playing a lot of the songs I listened to on the radio and on cassette (yes, I’m old). I thought it would be the greatest thing in the world to be able to play music with my friends. When I picked up a friend’s guitar, it felt comfortable, and I was fascinated with just pressing down the strings on the fretboard to make different sounds. Once I got a guitar and started to learn songs, I wanted to be able to write my own songs as well. Therefore, I needed to learn music theory. So my goals kept evolving, and as I heard more types of music I gained new sources of inspiration. All of these things kept me moving in a forward direction that eventually led me to a teaching and playing career.
Perhaps you only want to be able to play your favorite song, and the guitar part is stuck in your head because it is so cool sounding. Great! You’ve identified what you like, and what you want to be able to do. Now, it’s a matter of identifying the necessary steps to be able to achieve that ability. You may have to learn a few chords that are used in the song. Maybe the riff is created from a certain scale pattern you’ll have to get your fingers used to playing. You know what to expect to be able to play the song.

Sometimes the learning process is difficult and frustrating, and it becomes important to remind yourself of why you are practicing during these times. Remember what drew you to the guitar in the first place, who inspires you, and ultimately what you want to be able to play. Knowing these things about yourself will help provide a clearer path in your development, and give you a source of motivation while moving along that path towards reaching your goal. Without a defined understanding of why you want to be a guitar player, and realizing how you see yourself fitting this role, you may find yourself disappointed, but not exactly knowing the cause. Get to know yourself, then remember to practice hard, and play harder.