The Valley of Despair

Have you ever discovered a new hobby, some skill or sport or something, and dived into it with great enthusiasm? What a great feeling, to be swept away by excitement and bury yourself in learning something new! But… after a while, sometimes, you hit a wall. You look around you at other people doing the thing you’re learning, and you realize how much better they are than you. That realization can be so demoralizing that you want to quit!

The toughest part of learning music, or learning anything, is that point when you finally understand enough to realize you have a looooong way to go before you’re an expert. It’s part of what’s known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect. This theory gets referenced a lot in media these days; to sum it up, it’s the relationship between competence and confidence. Here’s a graph that explains it:

At first, when your competence hasn’t developed very much, you’re pretty confident in your understanding, because you don’t know any better yet. But as your understanding increases, there’s a point where your confidence crashes. You’ve learned enough to understand that your level of expertise isn’t actually that high. They call this the Valley of Despair. Sounds deadly.

We’ve all been there, haven’t we? I took up crocheting a little over a year ago; I quickly discovered that I really enjoyed making physical things, and I found the meditative quality of repetitive motion to be so soothing. Folks commented very positively on my projects whenever they saw me with my yarn and hook. I thought I was figuring it out pretty well. I thought, “Hey, I could be pretty great at this!

THEN I thought, “Let’s see what kind of crochet stuff people are posting on Instagram!”

Boy howdy, did I regret that thought.

As I scrolled through #crochet, my confidence crashed harder than it had over anything in a long time. WOW are people ever making some amazing things with yarn! I was immensely, comically demoralized. It’s kind of embarrassing to look back on it now.

Let’s look back at the graph, though, and notice that the crash isn’t where that line ends. As your expertise continues to increase, your confidence comes back up again. But of course, that only happens if you don’t quit!

I see my students go through this crash into the Valley of Despair, sometimes in slow motion, sometimes all at once. And because understanding and technical ability don’t always grow at the same pace, music students often experience mini-crashes at those times when their understanding makes a leap ahead, or after experiences that make them compare themselves to new examples of expertise. I try to help them understand that this is a painful but inevitable part of the process of learning a skill. We make space for those feelings of frustration, embarrassment, or inadequacy. But then we continue to learn despite those feelings. This is why mastery isn’t truly the main goal I promote in my teaching. Progress should be celebrated. Every achievement should be celebrated, not in relation to what anyone else has achieved or what it’s possible to achieve, but just for its own sake.

I did not quit crocheting after my Instagram incident. Actually, I followed a bunch of crochet hashtags, and now I love admiring other people’s work and taking inspiration from it. My own work got significantly better because of my exposure to that initially demoralizing plethora of expertise. My Insta handle is @laurelmakesstuff if you want to see some of it!

If you’re a music student, or a student of anything, please don’t curl up and die in your next Valley of Despair. I know it’s hard to believe it when you’re in the middle of that experience, but the joy and confidence you’re seeking are ahead of you. Just keep moving ahead - keep learning and practicing - and you’ll get there.