Why You Only Notice Your Mistakes (And Not Your Improvements)
1. Perception
Learning a skill like the piano appears to be (sometimes at least) a long term game of self-torture. Every time we play a piece of music, we can’t help but mentally point out all of the errors that we are making. Yet, we don’t do the opposite and pay an outsized amount of attention to all of the things we do correctly.
So…why is that? Why do we focus so heavily on all of the problems within our playing? Can we do something about it, or is it a good thing?
Well, humans are wired to focus on the negative, and this is something known as “negativity bias”. It is a survival mechanism that means we can identify threats and then pay more attention to them. If we ignored negative threats, then that might cause death…or even worse, more piano mistakes!
This means that although paying particularly close attention to mistakes on the piano is not really advantageous for our survival. In fact, for a skill such as the piano, it can potentially make it feel like you are making much less progress than you actually are.
However, knowing that our brains involuntarily work in this way can offer us some helpful ways of improving at the piano.
2. Awareness
When we have a negative experience (a mistake on the piano - in this case), it is much harder to ignore and easier to remember. This is why many people struggle to keep playing fluently when they make a mistake. But, we do also find it easier to recall what the mistake was…and this is a massive advantage for learning the piano.
This natural way of thinking means that we are naturally going to problem solve simply due to the outsized attention we pay to the things that went wrong. Imagine for a moment you are looking at a box full of blue balls and there are 3 or 4 red balls amongst them. If someone said “remove 3-4 balls from the box, you can choose any”, many of us would naturally want to remove the outliers (the red balls) to leave the sea of blue balls in the box.
This demonstrates that even a small amount of extra focus being used on something will make us naturally gravitate towards solving that mental itch that we have. Although, I did just make this experiment up…so who knows! But this does seem to make intuitive sense (and happens to neatly back up my point).
Interestingly, our awareness of problems expands much faster than our ability to solve those problems. Typically learning works by having something brought to your attention, then practicing that thing and then it becoming part of your musical vocabulary.
This means two things;
Firstly, our awareness of problems necessarily expands faster than our ability to control those problems. Meaning, we will always be more aware of mistakes than we are able to fix them and therefore you will never play a piece you are 100% happy with (depressing, I know!).
Secondly, the better you get the more you can hear. As you improve on the piano more mistakes make themselves known to you and therefore improvement is inevitable given enough time, practice and focus on mistakes (much less depressing).
So, it is actually the case that as you get better you aren’t making more mistakes, which is what it can sometimes feel like, but you are comparing yourself to a new standard.
3. Integration
So, is there a way that we can take the positives from our ability to notice mistakes but also not torture ourselves with them?
Yes, there is!
Although we are naturally wired to look for threats (even musical threats), we can train ourselves to rebalance the scale a little and also see improvement.
Here are several ways that you can do that:
Firstly, record yourself every so often. When we distance ourselves from what we are playing, it is much easier to listen objectively. When we are in the middle of playing something, every tiny mistake might feel important, but when we record ourselves and listen, we almost hear it (in an evolutionary sense) like it’s someone else playing, and we are less threatened by the mistakes.
Secondly, compare yourself over much greater periods of time. It does very little good to compare your ability from one day to the next. If you want to assess your level of improvement on the piano, then think about what you were playing 1 month ago, 2 months ago, or even a year ago. This can be the scales, the theory, or the pieces you were working on at the time. Zooming out can show you that no matter how each individual practice feels, you are moving in the right direction.
Lastly, try to track specific wins to give yourself something to deliberately focus on. This means defining what “better” actually is. For example, a mistake you may notice is a missing dynamic within a piece of music. In this case, you may track your general ability to pay attention to dynamics and, over the course of several months and several pieces of music, you can more easily track how attentive you are to this problem.
Mistakes are always feedback in piano learning, yet our thoughts often want to give them an outsized weighting of importance. Improvements, however, are accumulated over longer periods and are much harder to point to and identify in the same way mistakes are. But even with an extreme focus on mistakes, better awareness isn’t a weakness, it’s a sign of growth.
Matt
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