This comment was clearly made by someone who has never practiced art or music at a high level. You are trying to compare your experience as a musician with someone who has worked toward and dreamed of being one of the best there ever was since some time in, most likely, early adolescence.
I was among the best in my year on my instrument in the country. I went to one of the top music schools in the world, and then I moved to New York to keep studying and start working as a musician. Some time in the middle of the financial crisis, I got tired of being broke all the time, and of constantly battling injuries (that's thing you've probably never had to worry about, as an amateur musician. Your arm is sore? You get to take a few days off!), and teaching music to the spoiled children of the masters of the universe. I learned to code and started working as a programmer.
Everyone who has ever been among the best, but didn't quite make it, has to, at some point, decide they didn't make it, and quit. Once I quit, I barely touched my instrument for two years. Playing when you're out of practice can be pretty painful to someone who is highly trained. You've worked for years toward perfection and then you just have to start accepting... less than that.
Here's another thing that happens when you quit: you have a constant voice in the back of your mind wondering whether you gave up too easily. You were there with the best people in the world, and now you watch them take their place among the leading lights of the art, and you can't stop picturing yourself among them. It's not whining, it's the painful experience of giving up your lifelong image of yourself. Being a musician, a top level, professional musician, dominates your whole identity. Try to imagine this: rather than finding out at an early age that you're not the next Jimmy Page, you get very good very quickly at a young age, and people start telling you, hey, you could be the next Jimmy Page. You work for decades to get good enough, sacrificing your personal relationships, your childhood, choosing over and over again to stay in and work instead of doing whatever else you could be doing, and then at age 30 after years of near misses and barely scraping by, you realize you're just not the next Jimmy Page. It's not an early realization, it's a gradual defeat. And it's devastating.
Regarding imposter syndrome, there have been studies of musicians using the standard "sandwich method" of delivering criticism, in which the criticism is sandwiched between two compliments. Trained musicians often don't hear or register the compliments at all. I had this experience with my girlfriend recently. She played some excerpts for me, I said, "wow you sound great, I liked X and Y. Here are a few things you should work on." She asked me later if I thought she was complete shit. I said, "I said you sounded great," and she said "You did?" She literally had not even heard me say I thought she sounded great.
Here's another fact about the music world. People are often loath to tell you that you don't sound good (or don't sound great). Musicians know this, and so every time someone tells you that performance was great, there's a little part of you that wonders if you're being lied to. Often you'll get hired by a contractor to play a gig, and then never get called by them again. Sometimes that's because they have their regular people and you were just a stand in, or because they died or moved or whatever. Other times it's because they didn't like your playing. But they never tell you which one it is. So every time you don't get called back for a gig, regardless of what the actual reason is, there's a chance it's because you weren't good enough. Feedback is not consistent and it is not reliable.
So given those two facts, is it a wonder musicians can suffer from imposter syndrome? It's not a question of, "people will realize I can't play guitar," it's the very fine line between being very very good, and being great. Regardless of which side of the line you're on, you're always wondering.
Very well said. Music is... hard. (I guess all careers in the arts are.) I too have worked both as a musician and a programmer, although I decided to go back to music after almost burning myself out writing code in my 20s. (Music is what I studied at university; I am a self-taught programmer.)
My main reason for returning to music, of course, was a love of it – but the constant voice in the back of your mind you mention was also a part of it. This voice nagged through my programming years, dulled somewhat by the immersive nature of programming and the sheer joy of getting things working. (Even now it's hard not to want to jump back in when I see something interesting on HN!)
My thoughts on music as a career at this point (I'm in my mid-30s now), is that: you really need to want to do it, because the rewards in terms of recognition, financial success, etc, are minimal and/or fleeting. Having some financial buffer from having worked in the computer industry helps, but you need to not leave it so late that you forget the hunger, or that you are accustomed to a comfortable lifestyle. The biggest thing that I've realised in the past few years, and this applies more to composer/performers than it does to concert musicians, is that if you want to find an audience (and then perhaps some success), you really need to find the core of what makes you unique and go with that. The world is already saturated with composers and musicians that sound like a lot of other people. (This is a lower bar than the sort of groundbreakingly uniqueness that comes along once in a generation, but it's a bar nonetheless.)
Anyway, I've rambled enough. My best wishes to anyone that chooses the music road.
Here's something I've wanted to ask a professional musician for a while. It seems like most listeners' enjoyment doesn't actually depend much on your technique, which you've spent years perfecting. Practicing your instrument (or more general "musicianship") might not even be the main limiting factor for becoming a sought-after musician, as opposed to things like charisma and theatrics, or songwriting, or imagination... I don't know. What do you think?
I think of technique in very different terms. Technique is the ability to execute very precisely what's in your head on your instrument. That ability is meaningless without all the things you list, especially, I'd say, imagination, but so too are those things meaningless without technique. You can have all the imagination in the world, but if you can't execute what's in your head exactly, that imagination will not be illuminated for the audience.
My take on it is that technique is something you need to a certain degree, but it alone is not enjoyable. Good music, is subjective, and a combination of many things. Good technique can help, but even a singer without a typical singing voice for example can be very enjoyable to listen to, like Ian Dury.
I was among the best in my year on my instrument in the country. I went to one of the top music schools in the world, and then I moved to New York to keep studying and start working as a musician. Some time in the middle of the financial crisis, I got tired of being broke all the time, and of constantly battling injuries (that's thing you've probably never had to worry about, as an amateur musician. Your arm is sore? You get to take a few days off!), and teaching music to the spoiled children of the masters of the universe. I learned to code and started working as a programmer.
Everyone who has ever been among the best, but didn't quite make it, has to, at some point, decide they didn't make it, and quit. Once I quit, I barely touched my instrument for two years. Playing when you're out of practice can be pretty painful to someone who is highly trained. You've worked for years toward perfection and then you just have to start accepting... less than that.
Here's another thing that happens when you quit: you have a constant voice in the back of your mind wondering whether you gave up too easily. You were there with the best people in the world, and now you watch them take their place among the leading lights of the art, and you can't stop picturing yourself among them. It's not whining, it's the painful experience of giving up your lifelong image of yourself. Being a musician, a top level, professional musician, dominates your whole identity. Try to imagine this: rather than finding out at an early age that you're not the next Jimmy Page, you get very good very quickly at a young age, and people start telling you, hey, you could be the next Jimmy Page. You work for decades to get good enough, sacrificing your personal relationships, your childhood, choosing over and over again to stay in and work instead of doing whatever else you could be doing, and then at age 30 after years of near misses and barely scraping by, you realize you're just not the next Jimmy Page. It's not an early realization, it's a gradual defeat. And it's devastating.
Regarding imposter syndrome, there have been studies of musicians using the standard "sandwich method" of delivering criticism, in which the criticism is sandwiched between two compliments. Trained musicians often don't hear or register the compliments at all. I had this experience with my girlfriend recently. She played some excerpts for me, I said, "wow you sound great, I liked X and Y. Here are a few things you should work on." She asked me later if I thought she was complete shit. I said, "I said you sounded great," and she said "You did?" She literally had not even heard me say I thought she sounded great.
Here's another fact about the music world. People are often loath to tell you that you don't sound good (or don't sound great). Musicians know this, and so every time someone tells you that performance was great, there's a little part of you that wonders if you're being lied to. Often you'll get hired by a contractor to play a gig, and then never get called by them again. Sometimes that's because they have their regular people and you were just a stand in, or because they died or moved or whatever. Other times it's because they didn't like your playing. But they never tell you which one it is. So every time you don't get called back for a gig, regardless of what the actual reason is, there's a chance it's because you weren't good enough. Feedback is not consistent and it is not reliable.
So given those two facts, is it a wonder musicians can suffer from imposter syndrome? It's not a question of, "people will realize I can't play guitar," it's the very fine line between being very very good, and being great. Regardless of which side of the line you're on, you're always wondering.
Does that clear things up?