How I Decided Not to Be a Concert Pianist
(and how you might decide what you really should be!)
by Ken Wade
Copyright © 1980, 1999 by Kenneth R. Wade
At age four I had already decided on my life’s work. I would be an ambulance. driver, policeman, doctor, fireman, and President of the United States. Well. maybe the presidency came in when I was seven or eight. But it did play a prominent part in my young plans.
By the time I was ten the doctor and ambulance driver plans had to go by the wayside. Maybe you never saw the movie "One in Twenty Thousand," but when I watched that lung surgery in color, I changed my life plans. On the way home from the movie I admitted to Mom that I'd decided not to be a doctor. She said blood was something a person could get used to. But my decision was final.
A few years later, when I came to grips with the fact that I hated to kill even a mosquito, I decided I wouldn’t do very well as a gun-toting lawman.
The presidency didn’t die so easily. It took a few years as a pastor administering churches to convince me that administration, decision making, and sitting in committee meetings could never make the top ten list of things I was good at or enjoyed
Maybe some day I’ll be a volunteer fireman though. I always did like to find out where the fire was.
As those childish aspirations faded one by one, they had to be replaced with something else. Since I liked science in school, decided I’d be a scientist I soon realized though, that I should specialize. I especially liked fooling around with my cousin’s chemistry set, so I decided to be a chemist. The idea of mixing two or three chemicals together and having smoke or steam or fire come out of the test tube really appealed to me.
I had trouble figuring out the proper mix to get smoke or steam or fire though, so I pulled out my dad’s high school chemistry book. I diligently studied elements, valences, and the periodic chart, but I still couldn’t figure out how to make smoke or steam or fire! So I contented myself with raiding the kitchen for baking soda and vinegar to mix together in pill bottles with snap-on caps. I got so I could blow the cap off and hit the ceiling or a wall every time.
Somehow I got disillusioned with chemistry. I couldn't see any future in shooting caps off pill bottles, and even if I could figure out how to make smoke or steam or fire, I didn’t think anyone would pay me to do it. So I gave it up as an occupation without a future. I think the organic chemistry unit in high school influenced my decision too.
Besides that, I had become interested in electronics. My dad had a big box of spare radio parts plus a book about amateur radio. Once again I launched into diligent study. A good friend and I started building amplifiers, rectifiers, radios, and test circuits on cardboard boxes.
Of course I hadn't yet limited my occupational options to just one. I continued to consider all sorts of directions. It was in the ninth grade that it dawned on me that I was so supremely talented that I could do well at anything I really put my mind to. The revelation came to me one day as I sat on the piano bench practicing, for the 150th time, a non-simplified version of "Yellow Bird." I had gotten so good at that piece that I could play it fast and jazzy or slow with lots of feeling, and all with hardly a mistake! It was a new thought for me to realize that I could really become a concert pianist if I wanted to.
The next year I met Tom. He played piano for the high school choir, so I considered him a kindred musical spirit. I decided to invite him over to compare notes. The day before he came to visit, I practiced Yellow Bird six times. When he got there, I asked him for some advice on how to do the chording.
"Well, let me hear how you play it first," he said.
I played a beautiful rendition that would have brought the house down with applause had it been full of aunts, uncles, and cousins.
"That's not quite how I'd do it," Tom said with his chin held high in the way I have since learned is characteristic of musicians. He wasn't stuck up, only his chin was.
Tom sat down on my piano bench, scanned through the music once, and then started to play. When he finished, I said, "Oh, you must have practiced that before."
"No." he said.
Tom played a few more songs, some from memory, and then we went down to my electronics shop. He didn't know a capacitor from a resistor, so I kept him there for the rest of the afternoon.
I didn't give up on playing the piano then and there, but I had learned something about talent and gifts. I mulled it over for awhile and within a year had decided against auditioning for the New York Philharmonic.
So I decided to become an electronics engineer. I retreated more and more to my basement experimenter's shop. When I felt I had learned all I needed to know about vacuum tube circuits, I decided to tackle that new marvel called the transistor. I bought a book called The ABC's of Transistors and started reading it. But I got stuck on about the letter "B." Semiconductors with their moving electrons and holes baffled me. I gave up on transistors for the time being, figuring someone would explain them to me some day. But I didn't give up on being an engineer. I figured my interest in science pointed that direction, and I was even fairly good at math.
Then came my senior year. The junior year had gone all right, except that I think my mind just about burned out during the math unit on computer programming. And I hadn’t done very well at memorizing all the "elementary functions" we were supposed to know by year’s end.
After a summer's rest I felt ready to face another year. I was optimistic until Mr. Nelson produced the black paperback that was to be our senior advanced-track math book. One sentence in the book's introduction set off bells in my brain: "You will be expected to remember everything you learned last year." Last year's math was a blank spot in my memory.
The next morning I dropped math and took up study hall instead.
Next I decided to be a biologist. I hated dissecting frogs, and I always flicked mosquitoes with my finger to avoid smashing them to a bloody pulp on my arm. But I liked flowers, trees and things you could see under a microscope. I went on planning to study biology in college until the summer after I graduated from high school. That was when God gave me an unmistakable call to the pastoral ministry.
Zap! That took care of all those years of planning and aspiring in one fell swoop. I took theology in college instead of biology, or music, or medicine. And I've never regretted it, because God has given me evidences all along the way that the ministry is where He can best use me.
But not everyone feels a direct call from God like I did. It's not that He can't call each person to a specific life work, be it a plumber, a secretary, or a computer programmer. It's just that He doesn't choose to dictate His guidance to everyone with dramatic specificity.
For most people He seems to leave the decision up to the power of sanctified reasoning. After creatively analyzing your abilities, interests and personality, and the needs of the world, it's up to you to make the choice.
And, you can be confident of God's leading in the whole process of career selection. Through the normal, everyday occurrences of my childhood and youth, God was showing me which vocations I shouldn't choose, in preparation for the time when I would be willing to hear what I should do. God knows where He can use you, and He will guide you there if you're willing to let Him lead, and if you will study yourself and your options intelligently.
1999 PS
If I were writing an article about choosing a profession today, 20 or so years after I wrote this article, I would add that the greatest joy in life is to find something you are passionate about and enjoy doing that provides some benefit to others. That way your work will be your play.
But don’t try to do the opposite and turn your play into your work. If what you do is bringing pleasure only to you, you’ll soon grow bored and need to change your work or take greater risks constantly to maintain any interest in life. Rather, take on some great challenge, to somehow make the world a better place. Then you’ll never run out of things to keep you getting up each morning and launching into life with gusto.