Day 5: The pressure to succeed
Prior to embarking on this journey, I kept reminding myself how failure would be a natural part of the process. In fact, I even had a poetic exchange with a friend on the topic of embracing failures (excuse the capitalization):
At 11:56pm
I'M SO EXCITED DUDE
THE UNKNOWN IS SO SCARY YET SO FREE
I'M ENTERING A DARK ROOM
AND TURNING ON THE LIGHTS
WHAT THE LIGHTS REVEAL, I CAN'T CONTROL
BUT I WANT TO FLIP THAT SWITCH
I WILL KEEP ENTERING DARK ROOMS
Somehow that part of me has quickly faded—giving way to the doubtful, fearful, and pessimistic side. This part of the brain remembers each and every time I didn’t succeed, and no amount of comforting words can make it forget. I spent some time reflecting on the issue, only to find that it stemmed from purely internal pressures. Every voice around me has offered nothing but support, except my own. Do founders ever overcome this doubt, or do they just learn how to ignore it?
As an exercise to overcome this doubt, I did a little exercise. I took a page out of my notebook, titled it “Bad Ideas and Problems”, and let my mind run loose. It was an exercise in completely shutting off the filter in my mind, which meant I wrote down anything I could think of—including “New York stinks in the summer.” Even if I never end up pursuing these ideas, the exercise helped keep my mind running. Who knows? Maybe there’s something in that list which, after a few steps of iteration, is a promising idea.
What I worked on
I spent time today trying out my chord learning app, only to find it not that useful in its current state. I added sound functionality so that each chord would play out loud, allowing me to check my playing against what the app played. Unfortunately, that didn’t help much. Any time I messed up a chord, the chords would continue playing from my phone, which completely threw off my sync with the metronome.
For the next day or two, I’m doing to dive deeper into pitch/chord detection algorithms to see if they’re promising. If the app could wait for me to play the chord, correct my mistakes, and track my progress, I would definitely use it more. The dream is to get it into a state where I get addicted to using it every time I sit at the piano.