How to Be Happy Part 3: How Learning to Code Made Me A Better Guitarist

My first love in life was guitar.

From 19 - 25, I was obsessed with music and becoming a professional guitarist.

I spent a few years immersed in this lifestyle, playing professionally on cruise ships, casinos, bars, hotels, and pretty much anywhere else you can think of.

It was a ton of fun, and I have no regrets about spending a few years of my life in this phase.

But there was an unfortunate issue:

It wasn’t crippling; I could still play.

But it was a distraction.

It took me out of the moment and prevented me from playing as well as I could have or enjoying myself optimally.

Stage fright stuck with me for my entire short-lived career as a full-time musician. But then something interesting happened.

At 25, I desperately wanted a change from the full-time music lifestyle.

I was living with 7 roommates, working until 1 am on weekdays, and missing out on life with the girl I was dating because of having to work on the weekends.

I’d seen ads for “coding boot camps,” which looked awesome.

Who can say no to beanbag chairs, office dogs, kombucha on tap, and a 6-figure salary in just a few years without needing a degree?

I went for it and became a Front End Software developer.

I didn’t stop playing music, though. But there was a difference:

I didn’t have stage fright anymore.

Not one bit.

The shows I played after switching to becoming a “part-time” musician were amazing: they were 100% fun.

I was fully present and in the moment — I did some of my best playing during this overlap of transitioning from “pro-guitarist” to “guy who codes and sometimes shreds guitar.”

So what the heck happened?

It’s something I call self-worth fear.

When I was a musician, I attached my entire identity to the label guitarist.

My sense of self depended on how well I performed, particularly how well I impressed people.

This imbued my playing with a self-consciousness that:

a. Made my playing worse

b. Made me enjoy the process less

To use the analogy of the archer, I was shooting for a prize of gold.

I wasn’t shooting with all my skill.

Your Labels Get in the Way

Last week, In Part 2 of “How to Be Happy,” I brought up the idea of Me vs. I from Anthony DeMello.

The Me is your story - the collection of ideas you have about yourself.

The I is the foundational part of you that does not change, regardless of where you live, what you do for work, or how much money you have.

Suffering comes from an overattachment to the Me - from the need to prove the collection of stories true to ourselves and others.

In the 2008 financial crisis, too many men killed themselves because their stories were based on being a “success,” and the ensuing cognitive dissonance from losing their wealth was too much to bear.

When I was a professional guitarist, I had to enforce the story I had that I was a good guitarist and that I impressed people with my playing.

I grew to crave that praise, and I would get irritated if it didn’t come after a performance.

The drive to impress prevented me from doing my best work.

It imbued my playing with a self-consciousness that distracted me from being fully present, from being able to authentically channel the music within me, and from producing real art.

This isn’t the type of article that goes: “4 easy tips to separate yourself from identifying with your ego.”

This is not easy work. It takes decades, if not an entire lifetime.

But I’ve already seen a glimpse of it.

I know it’s real.

Shoot With All Your Skill

In a practical sense, abandoning the “me” won’t work.

Not unless you plan on spending the rest of your days in a monastery.

We need our egos, we need to live actively in the world, and a coherent identity and story enable us to do this.

The best we can do is to keep the me in proper perspective, which means not becoming so attached to its labels and stories that we cause unnecessary suffering.

You’ll find that, as with many challenges of life, you can turn to Stoicism for the answer.

The Dichotomy of Control is a Stoic idea from Epictetus. It separates things into those which fall under our control and those that fall out of our control.

Our thoughts, actions, resilience, perseverance, and character are within our control.

Everything else is not.

The opinions, responses, and actions of others are not in our control.

To become the archer who shoots with all your skill, to be fully immersed in the process without the ego-imbued self-consciousness of expectation that leads to cognitive dissonance and unhappiness, you need to focus fully on what you can control and ignore what you can’t.

Embrace the art of shooting.

Fuck the brass buckle and the prize of gold.

Derive satisfaction from the process, not the response from others.

This is to live as an artist, fully immersed in what you’re doing and tapping into something larger than yourself in the process.

When you get stuck on the level of “me,” overly concerned with how you’ll be perceived, the quality of whatever it is you’re doing inevitably decreases. And you’ll enjoy the process less.

And the coolest part about this?

Approaching life this way is the best shot you have of getting the prize of gold.

Because when you drop your attachment to the result and shoot with all your skill, you produce your best results.

Don’t outsource your happiness to things outside of your control.

Don’t let an obsession with your “me labels” take you out of the process.

Let the opinions of others come and go.

Let the results come and go.

Do the work.

P.S. I still love jamming on the ol’ guitar :)