Career Development and Playing the Banjo

April 1, 2010 8260 Comments2010-04-01+11%3A48%3A09Ben+Nash

Three years ago I started taking banjo lessons. Don’t ask me why. I guess the idea of being totally unfashionable just appealed to me. I didn’t know what I was getting myself in for! My teacher just happened to be a former world champion banjo player, and although I thought I was pretty hot stuff because I played guitar pretty well, he soon cut me down to size.

And so it began. Three-months of re-learning the basics of music theory. Six-months just practicing my right hand picking, a further year working on six tunes over and over again, and another year expanding my repertoire to fifteen tunes.

Now, I am not interested in establishing a career as a professional banjoist but I was interested in my teacher’s perspective on career development in the arts given his 50+ years successful career as a performer and a teacher (the guy knows Bob Dylan!).

When I asked him for his advice for establishing a successful career he said “ask five questions”:

Does it make you happy?

Do you have the aptitude to succeed in this field of endeavor?

Can you focus your energies sufficiently to practice and practice again?

Can you connect personally with people in this field?

Do you have the perseverance to overcome obstacles you will meet?

A person perusing a more conventional career may find advice from an old banjo player a little irrelevant; but the more I thought about it, the more his words made sense—even for ambitious people in today’s competitive corporate jungle.