You Can Do a lot if Your Want To is Big Enough

When I was in grade school I wanted to learn how to play guitar. My parents could not afford to give me private lessons so I was on my own. I had a little toy plastic guitar that at least had real strings on it. That guitar was in such bad shape. The neck was warped so badly that there was a three quarter inch gap between the neck and the strings where the neck attached to the body.

Tuning that guitar was hopeless, and pressing on the stings so they made a clear sound without a buzz was next to impossible. I had a tiny song book with some drawings of a couple chords and songs that had the chord over the word. Most of the songs I didn’t know, and there was no way to know what they should sound like since they were written out like poems.

Still, through it all, I was determined that I would learn. I studied the chord drawings and worked diligently on the song, “Little Brown Jug”. I would work on changing the shape of my fingers to match the chord over the word, trying ineffectively to make the chord sound right, but I knew I was fingering it right, and I was timing chord changes appropriately, albeit slowly.

Finally, in seventh grade, guitar was offered as a class in school and my dad bought me a guitar so I was able to keep learning in school. But it was my diligence in learning on my own that made my dad make the sacrifice to get me a guitar. He saw my want to was big enough.

! (This was my first guitar, recently discovered going through a storage area with family. It is somewhere near 50 years old. I had given it to my niece with a chord book and instructions on how she could teach herself guitar. She did.)

After my seventh grade year of guitar we took a family trip to visit my grandmother, who I had never seen before, and I found out she was quite the musician. She was one of those people who could play any instrument without having lessons. She played guitar, mandolin, fiddle, piano, and accordion to name a few.

One of the nights we were there Vern, from up the road a piece, brought his guitar and we had my first “jam” session. I didn’t know the songs but could play along because I could follow Vern. Then my grandmother showed me how to play some chords on the mandolin and I played mandolin, Vern played guitar and she played fiddle.

!(This was my grandmothers guitar, which I got to play with her the summer we went to visit. I got it when she passed.)

That next school year, eighth grade, I was placed into a guitar class that had the top eighth graders mixed with the lower ninth graders. We had to audition for which class we were placed into. It was advanced for eighth graders over the strictly eight grade class, but a little easier for the ninth graders over the ninth grade only class. I was there not because I was sooo talented, but because in seventh grade when we had to practice, we were to practice 30 min a day. I had practiced an hour or more a day. My want to was big enough.

It was easier for me to overcome the obstacles because I wanted to play guitar badly enough I pushed through things where otherwise I may have quit. A lesson my adult self can take from my teenage self.

What about you? Have you been able to get or do something because your want to was big enough?