Realize How Much You Can Teach Yourself—If You Want To
You already should know that with the internet, you can now find out almost anything you want to know. And the limits of learning depend upon you, your patience, persistence, and your ability to asks the right questions. I just learned, for example, that Abraham Lincoln was a self-taught lawyer. Did you know that? The message I’m putting out, in this post, is that there are a lot of ways to learn what you want to learn if you’re ready to dig in and go for it. I taught myself to play the piano by ear and how to sell cartoons to magazines and that’s not anywhere near as impressive as what other people I know have done. That’s what this post is about—teaching yourself. I hope you find it interesting and even inspiring.
How I Taught Myself to Play the Piano by Ear
If you expect me to now offer you my online course to play the piano by ear, relax; I don’t have a course like that and that’s not the way to learn how to play the piano by ear. If you want to learn, Iet me first ask you two questions to help you think more clearly about this task:
Q. Do you play the piano at all now?
Q. Why don’t you play by ear now?
Think about your answers now to both questions and then, after reading this post, let’s see how interested you are in trying to learn that skill.
I’ve thought a lot about how I learned to play the piano by ear, and learned how to draw and sell cartoons to magazines. I see four basic needs to learn any skill like these.
Dan’s 4 Big Needs for Any Successful Self-Teaching
A very strong desire to learn (most critical need)
A supportive learning environment
The right tools and materials
Enough early success to keep learning
I had all four of these needs given to me. I was born with a natural desire to push the keys to hear different sounds, my mother was an accomplished and very encouraging counselor (although she didn’t want to be my teacher), we had a fine baby grand piano, lots of records of different kinds of music in the house, and when I started trying to pick out chords and melodies on my own, I had enough early success to continue.
I didn’t start out to learn to play the piano by ear. My mother wanted me to take regular piano lessons, as she had done as a child. I used the John Thompson books to learn to read music and get started, but it was boring. My first piano teacher didn’t try to encourage me to play by ear because, well, to be blunt, he wasn’t a good piano teacher. Every accomplished pianist both reads and plays by ear, and my mother did both. When I got a better teacher, I got better music lessons. A good teacher is always important to learning anything. Teachers are part of the necessary learning environment.
I was surrounded by all kinds of popular and classical music growing up and I began to try to copy the chords and melodies I heard on the radio and on my mother’s records. I had some early success so I kept doing it. That’s how I began to play by ear. I kept doing it in high school and in college. The better I got the more I kept learning new songs to play. Eventually I was playing in a revivalist Dixieland band in college and entertaining people by playing popular songs with a fraternity brother who played the banjo. You get the picture. It’s like learning anything you love to do. Below you can hear a sample of my playing classical music to play by ear:
Years later, after I became an Account Executive at Young & Rubicam in New York, I had a rare and unexpected opportunity to play a vaudeville-style dance song for the legendary vaudevillian, George Burns. He loved it and we talked afterward. I’ll never forget what he revealed to me about his deep motivation to perform. In his words, “Now don’t ever tell my agent I ever said this, but even if you didn’t pay me, I couldn’t wait to get out on that stage and perform.” That was the level of his desire to perform.
How I Learned to Draw and Sell Cartoons to Magazines
This is my other big self-taught success story. Again, I didn’t start out to learn how to draw panel cartoons. My dream job when I was in high school was being a famous and financially successful syndicated cartoonist. I’m now talking about daily cartoon strips that you’ve seen in newspapers, like Peanuts or Dilbert. I loved that job because I imagined staying at home and drawing all the time on my drawing board—and making a lot of money doing it. Yes, I was naïve. The problem was, I couldn’t think of an idea for a daily strip, and I had no idea how to do all the kinds of work needed. But it was still my dream when I applied to the University of Illinois to start college in 1951, and I was surprised to see that the school offered no degree in cartooning. The degree that seemed similar was a degree in advertising design; so, I signed up for that. I was not good at design, and got very lucky again. During the next two years, I almost flunked out of college. I was bored and immature, and finally got drafted into the U.S. army during the Korean war. It was the best thing that could have happened to me. The Korean War ended just after my basic training ended, and I got two years of growing up experiences that prepared me to go back to college with much more realistic goals.
I couldn’t create a daily comic strip idea, but I could draw panel cartoons. These are drawings with a punch line at bottom; a cartoon style invented by the New Yorker magazine in 1925. Here’s, perhaps, the best panel cartoon I ever did: I sold it to a religious magazine but later Colliers wanted to buy it. That put me in the big time. I had also sold one to The Saturday Evening Post:
The degree I started at college, advertising design, was another lucky mistake. It introduced me to the world of advertising, and I loved it. When I return to Illinois after my military service, I finished my art design degree and then went to get a Master’s Degree in Journalism, a degree that set me up to apply for jobs like being an Account Executive in a big ad agency. And all of this was paid for by the VA because I was in the Korean War. You see why I call myself, “Lucky Dan”?
Why Didn’t Dan Become a Musician or an Advertising Artist?
You may be wondering why I didn’t go for a music degree, or try to be a creative in the agency world. I thought about it, but not for long. I began to think much more about money after I learned that I couldn’t make much money as a half-baked art director. That sobered me up quickly. My father had provided my family a good life and that’s the kind of life I wanted to continue living. Dad had turned me off to making money in some ways; but like many fathers from his generation, he was a bit over-controlling. He wanted obedience most of all from his sons, and he didn’t want to hear about my ideas. I was just a kid. I eventually saw I needed more money and that got me interested in being an Account Executive, not a creative person.
I think if I had ad father who wanted, and was able to, teach me about finance and investing, I might have had more interest in learning more about money and finance as a kid. Later on, I got much more interested in those subjects when my friend, Don Sodaro, brought me into his budget motel business and showed me a lot about how business worked. He introduced me to business thinking
I also had a lot to learn about people as well as business when I started working in the ad business. My bridge into those subjects was getting a job in consumer research. I loved learning about marketing and consumer behavior. Soon, with a family to support, and finally beginning to make some money, playing the piano and drawing cartoons became just hobbies and I continued doing both for the fun of it.
My Friend, Dana Gioia—The Most Successful Self-teacher I Know
I’ve met a lot of people who I know succeeded in business because they learned a lot from their business education and later their hard-knocks experience; my friend Don Sodaro is a prime example of that. But Dana Gioia is the only person I know who knew early on he wanted to be a poet, and then had the discipline to manage his education and life to finally achieve that goal by first getting an MBA at Stanford in order to make enough money to become a poet. He’s simply unbelievable.
I met Dana when I was a marketing consultant working for General Foods in White Plains where he worked after he got his MBA. I assumed he was committed to his business career; I had no idea he was really a poet in hiding - and a damned good one; a poet who achieved international acclaim. He later became Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington D.C., under George W. Bush. Dana knew early in life he wanted to be a poet. I don’t know how he knew; I know little about his early life. When I met him, he was a Vice President of General Foods Corporation, and living part of his life as a celebrity poet. When I began to learn about Dana’s achievements I told my friend, Donald Sodaro, that Dana might be deserving of an honorary Doctorate degree from Chapman University, where Don was Chairman of the Board of Directors. He agreed.
Dana received many honorary degrees and awards. What blew me away was his video on how he worked after hours every day to achieve his artistic success. I think of his accomplishments as those of Olympic status. Take a moment to view his advice on how he managed his life to become a poet.
Dan’s Net Take-Away
It’s amazing what you can learn by yourself, if you really want to. As artificial intelligence continues to develop, the possibilities will only increase. But the most critical questions are about what you want to learn and how much fire is in the belly, as they say. Luck always plays a role, of course, but a lot of successful people have the belief that you make your own luck, by continuing to work hard. I hope you realize your possibilities and continue to think about how you can make your life better. Hang in there!