On Giving Up

Today in the drum class, I gave up playing the song I was practicing. I had already spent three days learning it, and still couldn’t play it properly. In particular, I couldn’t keep the right tempo. I realized that I shouldn’t try anymore and decided to give up on it. I am largely an autodidact in many interests of my life. I taught myself programming, reading music, running etc by reading books, watching videos, listening to people. A big part of learning by oneself is knowing when to give up. There are many things in my life I’ve walked way from. Let me list a few: Playing video games As I child I loved playing video games, but growing up, I decided to stop. I realized that they were too additive for me, and for the kind of person I am, even though they were a lot of fun, they were turning out to be a net-negative. Higher mathematics I scored a perfect 100 in Maths in my board exams (high-school exams). I loved solving all those deferential equations, and vector calculus, and what…