Learning to play a musical instrument goes far beyond the narrow view of becoming a professional musician. Like other forms of art or competitive sports, it’s about years of mastering a skill firsthand, building new capabilities while refining old ones, and you alone are responsible for the outcome. The sentiment "it's not the destination, it's the journey" is incomplete: It's not just the journey, but who you become along the way. Learning any skill such as music, repeatedly teaches us discipline, consistency, time management, work ethic, self-reflection and improvement, and countless other transferrable skills that traditional academic study simply don't touch. Most importantly, it teaches us how to fail in order to learn how to succeed in ways most others will never begin to understand. Here is my story.
Learning Music Teaches Purpose
I started learning cello at age 9 by copying other people. I had no work ethic in anything throughout grade school, and at most got by whenever I could. I couldn't play in tune, and I had inaccurate rhythm. Looking back, my cello teachers provided no useful guidance, and I regularly used homework as an excuse not to practice, and practice as an excuse not to do homework. I never wanted to be a cellist, or anything for that matter, and had no purpose. When I was 15, uninspired, I quit cello in some attempt to get my academic life in order. But by senior year of high school, I was ranked third lowest of my class.
With no hope of ever attending college, as a Hail Mary I applied to Northwestern University School of Music to study cello. I even managed to miss the deadline to sign up for an audition slot, and had to badger the admissions office through emails and phone calls up until 15 days before the actual audition, hoping someone else would back out. Finally I was confirmed for an audition for Professor Hans Jensen's cello studio. But I also hadn't practiced my cello in over two years at this point. With two weeks to go I threw together my audition set and booked my flight to Chicago.
It was frigidly cold the day of my audition. There was no way I was going to last a day in Chicago winter. But all that changed when I walked into Professor Jensen's office. I began playing, and after about eight seconds of nervous rushing into an absolute train wreck, he stopped me, instructing I repeat cycles of alternating singular left and right hand operations, snapping his fingers in beat to dictate when to execute each move. There was instant improvement. Then he hit me with another practice trick. And another. For the first time in my life, I could see direct and tangible results in real time and before I knew it, my 10-minute audition turned into a 45-minute lesson. He even opened the door to a line of students outside waiting their assigned times to tell them to just come back later. I decided immediately, I must study cello with Professor Jensen.
Then two months later, a letter came from Northwestern's School of Music. I was rejected.
Learning Music Teaches Perseverance
However Northwestern set me a second letter: It was from the School of Engineering, and in what could only have been a serendipitous error, I had been admitted somehow. With no other college offers, I declared Computer Science as my major and packed my bags for Chicago, taking my cello with me. The first day of new student orientation I went straight to Professor Jensen's office and knocked on his door. He answered, remembered my name and what we worked on, but told me he didn't think I wasn't serious. Instead he accepted 5 other freshman students, 3 of whom were participating in the dual-degree program with other academic majors, and I just missed the cutoff. Seeing as I had arrived at his door anyway, to test me, he offered to teach me privately on weekends out of pocket. I was to carry my cello two miles in the snow to meet him off campus for 9am lessons on Saturdays, and pay him $100 per lesson (a fraction of his true lesson rate).
Engineering school on the other hand had a different price tag: tackling linear algebra and multivariable calculus with my prior poor study habits meant the cost was nearly every hour of every day. But I wasn't willing to back out from cello and let down a true teacher who had just given me a chance. The difference now was I had motivation, and it was time to see it through. I ended up with straight Cs my first quarter, but at least cello lessons were going well and I could finally play properly as a high school student should. But this wasn't high school anymore, and Professor Jensen regularly produced internationally-recognized players and held all of his students to that standard. Two of the original five freshmen decided this wasn't for them, uninvested in their job prospects as musicians, and switched their majors to economics.
Music Teaches Time Management and Consistency
This opened a spot for me, and I officially enrolled in the School of Music as a 5-year dual-degree student. This meant orchestra rehearsals and chamber music commitments on top of my already time-consuming engineering classes. If this were to work though, many things would have to change. I started doing my homework earlier so I could have more time to practice. I made friends with people smarter and more diligent than I in the School of Engineering so I could have help with exams and assignments. I used weekends as marathon practice sessions, and weekdays as study time. By the end of freshman year, I pulled off my first B in an engineering course.
Sophomore year added on music theory and history requirements on top of everything else. Daily practice, not just weekend marathons, was crucial to catching up to my peers at cello, but so were coding assignments and problem sets to that allowed me to be at Northwestern in the first place. I began consolidating time into large chunks of hours each day dividing clearly where and when I would focus on engineering vs music. When I was exhausted or stuck on one, I could break the monotony by going to a different part of campus and focus on something else entirely. Practicing cello became a break from debugging segmentation faults in C++, wave-motion physics problem sets became a break from secondary harmony analysis and so on, catching new wind with each switch. For the first time in my life by taking on more work, not less, I started to have things under control, and I started earning As.
Learning Music Teaches Ownership
Then Operating Systems happened (OS). Now a junior, this class was a rude awakening of month-long coding assignments in deep concepts that built on each other, regular exams, and weekly problem sets. It mercilessly punished procrastination and any attitude of silently being lost and "I'll just figure it out myself later." My sleep schedule was wrecked and I skipped lectures for all my classes, ironically to finish assignments due for those very classes. I also hated the fact I was still playing cello out of tune and couldn't tell which notes, which direction, how much, or why. Professor Jensen had some tricks of using the harmonic series and sympathetic resonance on the instrument, but I just couldn't see the targets let alone hit them consistently. Generally dissatisfied with me, and the overall progress of the cello studio as a whole, he started getting on each of our cases, demanding a minimum of three hours of daily practice for double majors, and six for cello-only majors. Not long after, two more of the original dual-degree students from my year dropped out from music, opting to focus on their academics instead.
Falling desperately behind on coding projects, and frustrated with my inability to understand intonation, more things had to change. I began synthesizing my mathematical model of how intonation works using what Professor Jensen taught me and what I recalled from wave-motion physics. I started going to the OS TA every week, embarrassingly explaining that I was an entire project behind, for help to really understand what the problem and goal was to even begin implementing them in code, and despite missing the entire last project outright, managed to squeak by with the hardest C I've ever worked for, no pun intended (OS was taught using the C programming language).
Not long after I interviewed for an internship at Microsoft. Intrigued by my OS story, probably not the part about being a C-student again, but more likely the behavioral changes I made when I realized how lost and behind I was, to my surprise my interviewers made me an offer for the summer. The internship was a success and became a full time offer, contingent upon I graduate by the following spring. I still had two years left of the dual-degree program, so my options were A) Drop the music degree and finish computer science with peace of mind that I had a high-paying job waiting for me, B) Drop the computer science degree and finish music which was what I wanted to attend Northwestern for and but didn't deserve initially, or C) Decline the job offer and stay in school the full five years.
Learning Music Teaches to Excel
By this point, I was no longer the directionless, uninspired, and unmotivated underachiever I was just three years ago. I chose D) None of the above - I petitioned Northwestern to take on my fourth and fifth years concurrently to work for Microsoft to start my career. I packed in 9 classes per quarter my senior year. I averaged nearly 4 hours of practice a day. I feared no course. At the end of the year, I won the concerto competition playing my dream piece at the time, Sergei Prokofiev's Sinfonia Concertante, op 125. But I wasn't entirely rid of my old habits, and once again, neglected to sign up for a graduation recital time slot and was relegated to booking an expensive off-campus venue. When I went to make and pay for my reservation, to my surprise, the receptionist behind the desk told me it had already been taken care of. She described a familiar face who had stopped by earlier that week and mentioned that I would be coming in to book the hall. It was Professor Jensen, who had known me so well by then, and covered my graduation recital hall rental fee, silently returning all that I had paid him my freshman year. By this time I was the last cellist standing of my audition year, when four years prior I wasn't even admitted.
After three years at Microsoft at its Mountain View, California office, I changed jobs to work down the street at Google. During this time, I maintained my practice regime of a few hours a day after work and regularly gave recitals, but still felt there was so much more to learn that I couldn't do on my own. The next two years I dedicated my weekends and nights to preparing for graduate study in cello. With weekly coaching from another former Hans Jensen student, San Francisco Bay Area-based cellist Jihee Kim, I auditioned for and was accepted to The Juilliard School in New York City to pursue a Masters Degree in cello.
Music Teaches Efficiency and Efficacy
Though I had saved up for 5 years and had a steady paycheck from a tech job, it wasn't life-changing money. Paying both a mortgage for my home in California and graduate school tuition, I thought it best to keep the tech job and forgo housing in New York City. Inspired by my new teacher at Juilliard, Professor Richard Aaron, and his then-weekly commute from Michigan where he also taught, I consolidated my classes to a few contiguous days per week, and flew weekly from California to New York. With only a cello available part of the week, and the reputation of pursuing a Juilliard graduate degree to uphold, music was teaching me a fourth lesson: always do everything with purpose and with specific goals in mind, especially when time is scarce. Thursday nights I took the red-eye flight out of SFO to land just in time for my 9am Friday morning classes, worked remotely on Friday afternoons to align with the time zone difference, and Monday mornings I took the 7am flight back to make it back to my desk by 11am. I told no one about my commute, and no one never noticed, not even Professor Aaron. By the time I graduated, I even got promoted at Google.
Learning Music Teaches You to Outperform
As I continue to write the next chapters of my journey, today I proudly serve as the co-founder and the CTO of Zocal Inc., where we built the world's first and only large-scale mobile device location sharing and tracking service from scratch. I am also the founder and Executive Director Young Artists Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to recognizing excellence in and cultivating the next generation of classical musicians, inspired by the mentorship provided to me by Hans Jensen. Earning an engineering degree taught me to handle structured and goal-oriented tasks, but studying the cello instilled in me qualities for building entire organizations: discipline, work ethic, perseverance, but most importantly, ownership. Without the cello and guidance from a life-changing teacher, I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am today. My name is Jeffrey Li. I am a cellist, and this is what learning music has done for me. What can it do for you?
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