What If Our Obsession with Progress Is the Very Thing Preventing Musical Growth?
On slowing down, listening deeply, and learning without measuring.
We’re trained to measure progress — in tempo markings, minutes practiced, or repertoire learned. But what if those measurements distort more than they reveal? In the slow work of classical guitar, the things that matter most often resist quantification. This essay examines how our fixation on “getting better” can actually hinder our growth as musicians.
There’s a quiet tyranny that creeps into the practice room: the obsession with progress. It starts innocently enough — the wish to improve, to master difficult passages, to make visible progress. But gradually, the act of making music becomes subordinate to the measurement of it. The metronome becomes a scorekeeper, the repertoire list a productivity chart, and the daily session another task to be completed.
Yet the classical guitar resists this kind of control. It’s a slow instrument, a patient one. It demands subtlety, repetition, and an attention that deepens rather than speeds up. Its progress is cyclical, not linear. Some days everything feels effortless; the next, nothing works at all. In a culture that prizes efficiency and visible results, that rhythm can feel unbearable.
Growth in music rarely announces itself. It happens quietly, beneath the surface, while we’re busy counting the wrong things.
We like to imagine progress as a neat upward line — a predictable slope toward mastery. But artistry doesn’t follow that geometry. It unfolds more like the seasons: gradual shifts, long plateaus, brief moments of clarity. There are stretches when nothing changes for weeks, and then, suddenly, a tone opens up, a phrase makes sense, a technical hurdle disappears. Those moments aren’t random; they’re the flowering of slow, unseen work that the player has often stopped believing in.
This is why impatience can be so destructive. When we expect constant improvement, we interrupt the natural rhythm of growth. We analyze instead of listening, correct instead of exploring. And the more we monitor our progress, the more distant it becomes — like a reflection in water that vanishes when we reach for it.
Much of the problem lies in how we talk about practice. We’ve borrowed the vocabulary of productivity — efficiency, targets, output — as though artistry were a mechanical process. Practice journals are filled with tempos and repetitions, not sensations or discoveries. It’s easy to forget that awareness is the real product of time spent with the instrument. The goal is not to log hours but to refine perception — to hear more clearly, to notice more deeply, to think more musically.
When we chase efficiency, our awareness narrows. We begin to practice movement instead of sound. But when we slow down and give attention to the subtleties of tone, phrasing, and touch, we engage with the thing itself — not the idea of progress, but the reality of music. And ironically, that’s when progress begins to happen, often more quickly and meaningfully than before.
Some of the most important practice sessions look like failure from the outside. They’re the ones where you spend half an hour shaping a single measure, or experiment with the pressure of the fingertip until a tone starts to breathe. Those moments rarely feel productive, but they are the foundation of real musicianship. They develop the ear’s sensitivity and the body’s intuition — things no timer or checklist can measure.
Teaching makes this tension even clearer. Students want visible results. They equate progress with speed, volume of repertoire, or technical milestones. But the best progress often looks like stillness — a better sense of timing, a more relaxed right hand, the ability to play softly without losing presence. These are subtle, internal developments, and they unfold at the pace of attention, not ambition.
Over time, I’ve come to think that the real task of a musician isn’t to “improve” but to understand. To understand sound, movement, phrasing, and above all, oneself — how the mind reacts to difficulty, how patience feels, how concentration slips and returns. Improvement is simply what happens when understanding deepens.
The more we try to measure our playing, the more we risk separating ourselves from what’s essential. Technique can be counted; expression can’t. A metronome can tell us whether the rhythm is steady, but not whether the phrase breathes. The habit of constant self-evaluation breeds tension and insecurity, while the habit of attentive listening builds trust — not just in the hands, but in the mind behind them.
So perhaps the better question isn’t “Am I getting better?” but “Am I listening better?” The first question looks for proof; the second invites awareness. And if the answer is yes — even slightly — then progress is already happening, quietly and on its own schedule.
True growth in music is less about accumulation and more about refinement. It’s not a race up a hill but the slow clearing of fog from a familiar landscape. Each return to the instrument reveals something that was always there, waiting to be noticed.
When we finally stop demanding evidence of improvement, we often find that we’ve been improving all along — not because we pushed harder, but because we began to notice what was already unfolding.
So very true