WHY IT’S GOOD TO BE BAD AT SOMETHING

Learning to play the piano has taught Jennie Agg some valuable lessons, even though she struggles with it

Life lessons for Jennie Agg as she learns to play the piano

Last New Year, I made a resolution that changed everything: I started taking piano

lessons. My husband had bought me a piano the year before for my 30th birthday – a shiny black upright; a solid ‘starter’ piano for our family home. We’d always talked about wanting our children to learn to play.

The children didn’t materialise, but still the piano sat there stolidly, unused. So I found a local teacher and now, every other Wednesday, she sits with me while I plink, plonk, plunk my way through a piece, patiently nudging me towards the right notes, preferably in the right order.

It has been a revelation. Not because it’s uncovered a hitherto hidden talent. I am not about to tell you that I’m running off to join the conservatoire.

No. Playing the piano has been a revelation precisely because I’m really pretty bad at it. And that has taught me so much more than if I’d been good.

I stink. I suck. I have no natural gift for it whatsoever. Rhythm is a concept I am apparently only vaguely acquainted with. I have no ambition to inflict my playing on other people. The best I can hope for at this point is that the neighbours don’t file for an Antisocial Behaviour Order; sub-clause: crimes against Beethoven. (I’m joking – I can’t actually play anything anywhere near as complicated as Beethoven.)

But – and here’s the thunderclap moment – it’s okay. In fact, it’s brilliant. There is, I have discovered, power in being bad at something, realising it and persisting anyway.

It was frustrating at first. Being bad at something is instinctively uncomfortable. I wasn’t getting anywhere. Why was I even bothering? After all, I was never going to be a concert pianist. I was embarrassing myself and it was all pointless, pointless, pointless.

But slowly it dawned on me that the pointlessness was entirely the point. My teacher didn’t mind my slow, thudding progress. I wasn’t going to get in trouble for being rubbish. There was no deadline to hit, no exam to pass. I certainly wasn’t about to put it on Instagram.

Here then, is the joy of it: that it doesn’t matter to anybody else, not one single slipshod semiquaver. For me, it has become, to use an overused term, the ultimate act of self-care. After all, doing something that matters to you and only to you is a very short psychological leap – the mere ping of a synapse – to being the only thing that matters, even just for half an hour every other Wednesday morning.

According to Karen Rinaldi, author of (It’s Great To) Suck At Something, by not doing something we’re bad at, we’re ‘missing out on something wonderful’. ‘Our culture maligns and mocks ineptitude,’ she writes. ‘Because of this we fail to set aside space in our lives to cultivate new talents and interests. That kind of cultivation will inevitably include fits and false starts. And so, many of us skip doing it altogether.’

As I’ve persisted with my lessons, cheerfully shrugging through bum notes and my lack of coordination, I’ve felt sad thinking back on all those other times I’ve ducked out because I wasn’t The Very Best. The spin classes where I hid at the back, the dresses I didn’t buy because I knew they’d look better on a friend, the gigs where I didn’t sing along because I wasn’t precisely sure of every word, as if in fear of some unseen invigilator who’d swoop in and shame me for being a hopeless dilettante. But really, who’s looking?

For me, terrorising the ivories has carried me through barren – literally – times. My inept, inexpert playing makes a joyful racket in our sometimes-too-quiet, child-free house. It may not always sound wonderful but, to me, it still sings of trying and persevering; of refusing to wait for my real life to begin.

Now if you’ll excuse me, that Bach minuet isn’t going to murder itself.

‘Being bad at something is uncomfortable’