Why You Should Forget About Natural Talent For Guitar

Why You Should Forget About Natural Talent For Guitar

By Tom Hess

Want to quickly become a great guitar player? Don’t allow yourself to become consumed with thoughts of whether you are naturally talented or not. There are three main reasons why focusing on natural talent slows down your progress on guitar:

You Shoot Yourself In The Foot

If you blame not making fast progress on a lack of natural talent, you send yourself down the path of failure.

With this belief in your head, you stop making efforts to get better. It kills guitar playing progress.

On the other hand, if you think you ARE naturally talented, you are more likely to stop making effort to improve because you think you can just rely on your natural skills. This also slows down your progress by making you less motivated to get better.

It Makes You Focus On Things That Don’t Matter As Much

Regardless of whether you have a lot of natural playing ability or not, becoming a great guitarist requires tons of work. (This instructional guitar playing column goes over why.) No guitarist becomes truly amazing through natural ability alone. All of the greatest guitar players spent years working very hard to get to their respective levels.

You can’t know how much natural talent you have until you’ve done all you can to become the best guitarist possible.

It Doesn’t Matter How Much Natural Talent You Posses

Talent comes down to one’s natural tendency to make specific movements. Guitar players who have greater natural talent tend to practice correctly and quickly learn to integrate their playing skills effortlessly into any musical situation. The overwhelming majority of guitarists are not able to do this by themselves.

Here’s the good part: once you complete the same process that all great guitarists have gone through, you will become a great player just like them. The greatest guitar teacher can teach you how to do anything that any naturally talented guitarist can do. This programs you with a physical and mental skillset for talent making natural talent entirely unnecessary.

(Warning: a lot of guitar teachers who claim to be experts are not really experts. Make sure to pick your guitar teacher wisely.)

Here Is What To Do Now:

1. Understand that how good you get at guitar is completely up to you. YOU are in total control of your guitar playing future.

2. Learn basic things you can do right now to speed up your guitar playing improvement.

This instructional guitar playing column helps you improve your guitar skills fast.