Philip Hii – guitarist

Learning is experience

Everything else is information.

Albert Einstein

We’re awash in information, this is after all the information age and you’re surfing the greatest repository of information since the invention of thinking. (including some on this site, if I may say so myself.)

Reminds me of that other great quote I read.

Overheard from one portly rich man: “I wish I can hire someone to work out for me.”

That sums up the problem.

Information in itself is useless. It will not make you lose weight, or make you smarter, or turn you into a phenomenal guitar player (although my hope is that it will, with my extra powerful words and insights).

Unless of course if you happen to turn it into experience, in which case it is worth more than gold.

I have a good friend who is a real estate mogul, he told me it all started when he read a book on real estate investing over twenty years ago.

In that relatively short time, he was able to parlay the book and the information within it into gold, literally.

I am sure there were thousands of others who read the same book and left it on the shelf to gather dust. (And I would be one of them.)

In which case, all that information in that book were just so many words, completely useless.

Why is it so hard to turn information into experience? Because it involves a great deal of effort.

We can read and be knowledgeable about all the techniques on real estate investing, but it takes a great deal of effort to put that information into action.

We can read about how to lose weight but it takes a great deal of effort and time to put all those nice advice into practice and shed some pounds.

We can read about how to get a good tremolo but it takes a great deal of effort to turn that information into a rippling tremolo at your fingertips.

There is one bright spot in all this, however.

If you are successful in turning information into experience, you’ll be one of a rare breed, the select few, the chosen ones – because the majority of people will not.

Here’s another powerful quote I read, I forgot from where:

It’s easier to sit on your butt than to turn information into experience.

Effortlessness is an integral part of my strategy to guitar playing. In fact, it is the defining principle of my life.

But words have their limitations and the term ‘effortless’ is full of ambiguities. I’ve had at least one YSA (Young Smart Aleck) come and tell me he doesn’t practice because he’s doing it the “effortless” way.

Well, there’s a huge difference between effortless playing and not playing at all.

One describes a state of mastery, the other describes a state of general laziness (to use a politically incorrect word).

It got me thinking; how do you distinguish between effortless and no effort?

Here’re a few key differences that come to mind:

I’ve been reading The Little Book of String Theory by Princeton Professor Steven Gubser.

In this extremely well-written book, he manages to explain some pretty heady stuff in easy-to-understand layman’s terms.

For a natural-born skeptic like me, however, it’s hard to believe all the information in the book. I have a hard enough time believing in five dimensions, let alone ten. But I also have a hard time understanding how a 300-plus ton piece of equipment can stay up in the air and yet every summer I get into one to fly to Asia.

One paragraph in this fascinating book caught my attention.

On page 132, Professor Gubser wrote, “Long lists of objects cry out for a unifying theory with fewer elementary objects and a deeper level of explanatory power.”

He went on, “Chemistry’s periodic table receives such a unifying treatment through atomic theory. Helium, argon, potassium, and copper are all as different as they ever were in chemical reactions. But atomic theory reveals that they are all composed of electrons in quantum states of vibration around an atomic nucleus composed of protons and neutrons.”

This seems to me to be the perfect analogy for the principles espoused in the AOV.

On the surface, the different techniques on the guitar – arpeggio technique, scale technique and tremolo technique – may seem completely different and unrelated to one another. But at the basic level, they’re all unified by the same basic principles.

In fact, one can go further and add that on the surface, there doesn’t seem to be much in common between the martial arts, sports, or the classical guitar, but at the fundamental level, they’re all unified by the same goals of achieving speed, power, precision, and endurance.