Leaves are bursting with color here in upstate New York. Fall brings prospective parents and excited students. Here are a few thoughts I have on starting beginners…

1) Ignition. Where is the interest coming from? Has the child experienced ignition (link)? Are they ready to go? Is the parent right there with them?

If the interest is purely mechanical (no ignition), I ask families to attend a few lessons and group classes before we even talk about starting lessons. If I still don’t see a spark, I question the wisdom of embarking on this particular journey.

If the interest is pure ignition I make sure parents understand the day to day, foundation work necessary to become a violinist. The ignition, though powerful, is not perpetual. We will need other sources of energy to propel us on the journey.

2) My commitment. I cap my studio at 20 students. I dedicate myself completely to each family in the studio. When I imagine working with a new family I imagine working with them until their child turns 18. It is important families realize the depth of my commitment to them. The commitment doesn’t need to be reciprocal to get started, but just understanding the depth from my side can encourage depth on theirs.

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I recently talked to a parent with a ‘strong-willed’ child. She wasn’t sure how long the whole violin journey would last because she wasn’t sure how long her daughter would be interested.

I had a few ideas about the concept of quitting…

1) Bob Duke once shared the insight… your students will either play violin forever, or they will at some point quit. We need to de-stigmatize what it means to quit. It isn’t the end of the world. It isn’t taboo. People quit. In fact, everyone who isn’t playing violin anymore quit playing violin at some point. We would do ourselves a service to build some safe off-ramps for our students to avoid a traumatic end to an otherwise beautiful journey.

2) If two of the three members of the Suzuki triangle want to continue we will continue. Violin lessons are not the singular effort of the child. They are the shared effort of parent, student, and teacher. If two of those members (parent and teacher; teacher and student; student and parent) still feel strongly about continuing, it is the responsibility of those two to keep the momentum of learning moving forward. When it is truly time to find an ‘off-ramp’ it is often a unanimous decision.

3) Don’t quit when it is hard, quit when it is easy. Challenge is part of the process. In fact, challenge might BE the process. If you exit while moving through great difficulty you are quitting difficulty, not the violin. Difficulty will never go away, so it is best not to avoid it. Instead make your decision to quit once you’ve crested challenge and it is truly a decision about the violin and its place in your life.

When evaluating anything, examine from the ground up.

Start at the foundation. Is it stable. Then the middle. The core. The center of gravity. Where is the head? The limbs?

Are they stacked on top of each other? Balanced? Empty?

Is there a block? Tension? Non-coordination? Mis-alignment?

If you intend to do change anything, start at the fundamental.

What goes up must come down. What is hard must become easy.

Students, parents, and teachers might get trapped into thinking hard things are hard and easy things are easy.

They mistake the way of gravity. High falls to low. One turns inevitably into the other.

Hard falls to easy. This is the gravity of practice.

Define something as hard, as fixed, and the whole practice is stuck.

You might say, “We practice to make things easy.” Regardless what you say, practice is doing it’s own thing. Our effort is to not interfere. Our effort is to allow.

(for more on ‘easy’ look into Ed Sprunger’s Helping Parents Practice)

I know many young violin teachers for whom money is the biggest barrier to honing their craft. They feel they have to take on any student or gig they can to make ends meet. This overwhelming schedule combined with the stress of scarcity makes it impossible to do the deliberate practice of learning how to intentionally teach well.

A lot of luck and circumstance has allowed me to do what I do. But there are a few financial principles which have helped. Perhaps the ideas below could guide you toward a sort of financial freedom, too.

1) No debt mentality. I didn’t take on debt for college or graduate school. I’ve never had a credit card. My philosophy is if I’m not able to pay for it now, I should find a creative way not to need it or save and buy later. I’d never financed anything until we purchased a new car to withstand the Ithaca winters and have some value left on the other side. Even then we really, really looked closely at whether it was worth the mental burden of debt and put over 25% down in cash.

2) Entertaining myself with hard, free things. It costs no money to read a library book. Seven days of personal silent, introspective mediation is free and life transforming. Bicycling across the country with a tent costs no more than staying at home (less if you can shave off a month of rent). Learning to make restaurant quality food at home requires time and creativity and research, costs a fraction of eating out, and is so fun to share with family and friends. My philosophy is if I can choose between paying to be entertained and not, the free option is financially wiser AND almost always better for me.

3) Decide what you don’t need, but invest in what you love. I learned pretty early (mostly through minimalism) that spending money on a closet of trendy clothes, luxury transportation, big concerts, luxe travel, jewelry, expensive education, gym memberships, and a fancy apartment didn’t have much value to me. But when I bought my one pair of boots, and sandals, and pants, and shirt, I made sure to get exactly the one I wanted and which would last me for (hopefully) decades. I don’t spend money on gym memberships, but I’m happy to pay the (economic) travel expenses to go hike a gorgeous trail. I don’t often go out to eat, but I pay a ridiculous amount of money to have green tea and matcha shipped from Japan. I love playing and teaching violin, so I unabashedly spend a disproportionate amount of money on violin maintenance, strings, rehairs, and Suzuki teacher training. We eat a plant based diet so have no qualms paying (a lot more) for delicious, healthy, local vegetables, grains, nuts and seeds. When I do spend money, I spend it on what I love. So as I move through my day, I feel like everything I touch or do is a truly luxury item and is something I paid a lot for. But I was able to do that because I’ve ruled out many categorically expensive items I decided I don’t want/need them.

4) Permanent or impermanent? Spending falls into two categories. Either we ‘own’ the thing and it lasts. Or we pay for it once, but it no longer belongs to us. Permanent purchase examples are real estate, objects such as clothes or appliances, or a permanent share of something (a vacation house, investment in a company, etc.). Impermanent examples are rentals, food, concerts, movie tickets, travel, and subscriptions. When purchasing permanent things, my philosophy is to go for the best and the longest lasting. For example, it makes much more sense to buy one vitamix with exceptional warranty to use for 7+ years than to buy four cheap, breakable blenders from Target. The feeling of using the Vitamix is better, it is able to perform more functions, if it does break it will be replaced, and ultimately you can return it to Vitamix or trade it in and they will refurbish it for another customer. I opt to cut impermanent purchases to a minimum. I prefer as few rentals and subscriptions as possible and will go for free rather than a one off entertainment option (movie ticket). When I do spend money in the impermanent category I try to make the purchase as memorable as possible. Trip to somewhere new, meeting someone special, eating something inspiring, seeing something truly one of a kind. If you have rely on many ‘impermanents’ in your life, then you can’t cut down monthly spending without taking a big hit to your day to day quality of life. If instead you’ve built a life around permanent purchases, you can ratchet spending up or down without significant change.

5) Take a look at what you spend most on and see if you can creatively go without. Our collective big ticket items are student debt, rent, car payments, and food. We can’t opt out of learning, shelter, transportation, and sustenance, but we can get creative in deciding what to pay for. Do you really need to go to college? What are you able to learn online? What are you able to start doing and practicing right now? If you are going to college– don’t pay for it! In undergrad I lived in a cooperative house in the middle of Austin, Texas and payed $550 a month for housing and food. For two years I lived rent free in Ithaca. I now share a place for $300 a month. Some of the most inventive athletes of the 20th century lived in tents for nothing in Yosemite valley. I lived for 5 years with just a bicycle (no car). Where do your values, your health, and your budget align to determine your food choices? Or are you just reverting to a pattern determined by your upbringing, your friend circle? Human needs are non-negotiable. Our socialized standards for education, apartments, cars, and restaurants aren’t.

6) Get paid to practice. It blew my mind the amount of students draining themselves working day job entirely outside their field of interest. Try as hard as possible to get a job actually doing what you want to do– not hard in violin teaching. Far from distracting me from my studies, I found it actually inspired me to dig deeper and find practical solutions in every class.

7) Don’t couple income and spending. Your needs do not change, so why should your quality of life change as you make more money? My philosophy is to use money collected now to purchase every permanent item I would need to lead a frictionless, quality life. I don’t have extensive savings, but I do have material security (utility). Beyond permanent items I have few needs (just food, insurance, and flight travel), so won’t need to spend any much money at all. Not only does this quell the strange need to make more, buy more, have more, it also unchains my work (violin teaching) from having to become a large source of income.

People who have shaped my mindset on money…
Tynan https://tynan.com/finance1
Charles Eisenstein https://youtu.be/EEZkQv25uEs
Dave Ramsey https://www.youtube.com/user/DaveRamseyShow
Ramit Setthi https://youtu.be/BmAwa1nnB6w
Matt D’Avella https://youtu.be/zVcwvCL2C2c

I remembered the day I listened to Tim Ferriss’ interview with Jim Collins for the first time. It fundamentally changed my worldview.

There are many gems. One is when Collins explains how he hired himself.

“I like the independent path and I like betting on myself. So I had this idea, ‘Well gee, if you don’t have to be at IBM to be in business, why do I have to be at a university to be a professor?’ So I said to [my wife], I said, ‘You know I think I have this idea of I’d like to be a self-employed professor to endow my own chair and to grant myself tenure’….And the idea was to try to pursue really big questions that wouldn’t be constrained.”

Until I heard this podcast I hadn’t truly considered entrepreneurial academia. I felt that if I wanted to explore huge ideas systematically I needed to attempt a PhD and then land in an institution. But here was an incredibly deep thinker who instead imitated all that is good in an academic environment, stripped out what wasn’t, and figured he would discover something notable enough to support himself financially. Brilliant.

Most teachers seem to operate under the assumption that they are hired by the hour to work directly with violin students. But I sometimes play with an alternative model.

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I’m taking myself back to school. Except this time I’m designing my own course of instruction and carrying out the concept independently.

One of my frustrations in school is that I would get excited about a topic, but not have room to explore it.
Or I would become overwhelmed by so many ideas from so many classes that I couldn’t implement any of them.

When I first considered this ‘back to school’ project, I listed every subject I was excited about learning. Topics poured out of me. That running list is over 40 items long.

I knew that if I scheduled and held myself to all of them, I’d be boxing myself in. If I didn’t schedule anything, I would be overwhelmed by choice.

The solution? Queues and Templates.

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My partner informed me she was going back to school.
What was my initial reaction?
Jealousy. Of course then followed up by pure excitement for her.

But the jealousy surprised me!

I graduated in May of 2019, so I’ve only been out of school a year and a summer. So I should be frolicking around, relishing new found freedom, flexing my hard won skills, right?

It’s not so simple.

In school one has access to a network of individuals there to be stretched, teachers and mentors providing guidance and feedback, and assignments requiring you to generate work. An intense building, practice rooms, and a daily commute helped protect the ritual ethic of work. A few paces outside the music building: a library.

What I missed from school was the growth curve. A feeling a being stretched and assimilating vast swaths of information. A place to go, physically and otherwise, to do the work of learning. The wealth of information available at any moment.

What I didn’t miss from school was the socialization, the stress, the pressure, the artificial deadlines, the excess, and the multiplicity (taking 5 classes at a time).

It struck me that I could take myself back to school, too.

But rather than enslaving myself to a bloated collegiate system, I could design my own compact program. It would be rooted in all the tenets of learning I’ve come to understand as essential.

• healthy environment
• robust containers
• deliberate practice
• review
• proactivity vs. reactivity (or creativity over consumption)
• one pointedness
• subtraction
• undulation
• harnessing the unconscious mind

I could study what I deemed to be the most important subjects. I could focus myself on just one topic at a time. I designed a template of study, which, when completed, would demonstrate my own processing, synthesizing, and practicing of the subject I learned. I planned no more than four courses ahead, allowing the serendipity of learning to guide my path. I began to cultivate habits and rituals to slip me into optimal learning states without needing ‘go’ anywhere at all.

I’m in my second month of learning and absolutely loving it. It feels like my full-time job, which in some ways it is.

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I started the year with a radical idea.

I’d discovered the benefits of a low information diet as early back as freshman year of college. Tim Ferriss and The Minimalists had my attention. They advocated taking a close look at the volume and quality of the information consumed daily.

News?
Social Media?
Blog posts, medium, LinkedIn articles?
Youtube videos?
Advertisements?
Email memos?
Coursework?
Books?

All of the above splinter our attention. Rather than a single beam of focus on the most important topic of our choosing, we have a scattered, piece-meal view of the world.

Moreover the stream of information coming in is handed to us, not chosen.

Open up the paper, editors tell you what to think.
Click on the instagram app, your feed dictates your experience.
Watch one YouTube video, the recommended bar prompts your next watch.
Log into email, every one else’s agenda stares at you with urgent or extra-urgent blue dots.

When you let the world decide what you pay attention to, the world will stretch you further than your attention could ever accommodate. An explanation for our fatigue and ineffectiveness.

And it’s true.

When I had the discipline in the past few years to tune out news, social media, random email checking, and blog surfing, I felt better. Settled. Quiet. Optimistic. Motivated.

In 2020 I took this to the extreme. If this is my foundational year of full-time teaching, then I ought to devote as much energy to teaching as possible. I adopted Joshua Waitzkin’s philosophy of “creating empty space as a way of life for the creative process.”

The radical idea? Go Information Free. Live in solitude (without the influence of any other human ideas).

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I was trying to explain to a parent new to the Suzuki Method why the Suzuki teachers from the Ithaca Virtual Suzuki Experience were so different from each other.

She observed wide variance in teaching styles, interests, strategies, stories, and games.

“Imagine one-hundred master chefs,” I started to explain. “If each were given the task of making a grilled-cheese sandwich, consider the diversity of grilled-cheese sandwiches you’d be handed!”

When asked to ground ourselves in a common repertoire and philosophy, we Suzuki teachers don’t collapse into a one-dimensional monolith. Quite the opposite. Unifying around one project highlights just how different we all are from each other: our backgrounds, our personalities, our gifts.

And we can guarantee every child who comes into contact with this common repertoire and philosophy will have their beautiful uniqueness highlighted, too.