Every time I'm tempted to say that I didn't have the time, the reality is that I wasted my time doing something else. (like writing comments about my grandmother on Hacker News)
Among my resolutions for 2010: learn guitar.
Step 1: signed up for weekly lessons every Thursday, as of ... 20 minutes ago.
Onward!
I know... it sounds dumb. But I'm serious. It really helps.
1) When you learn, say, the C Major chord, make a new card that says "play the C Major", with the answer being the fingering chart for that chord. It will then keep track of how well you remember that chord and ask you to play it less often as you get better and better at remembering it.
2) When you learn to play a particular song, set up a card to remind you to play it. The answer to this one should probably just list what book + page number to find the song. (That's just for the early stage when you might not remember it at all.)
3) Finally, set up a Seinfield chain ( http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-se... ) for the task "practice my guitar" where the task is simply to work through the guitar flashcards for the day (there's often surprisingly few of them). http://www.joesgoals.com/ is a particularly good tool for something like this.
Good luck with your foray into the world of music. I hope it becomes a real passion for you.
My students who watched a lot of TV and were allowed to play in the living room got better, faster than those who didn't.
You are the man who used to boast
That you'd achieve the uttermost,
Some day.
You merely wished a show,
To demonstrate how much you know
And prove the distance you can go....
Another year we've just passed through
What new ideas came to you?
How many big things did you do?
Time...left twelve fresh months in your care
How many of them did you share
With opportunity and dare
Again where you so often missed?
We do not find you on the list of Makers Good.
Explain that fact!
Ah no, 'twas not the chance you lacked!
As usual-you failed to act!
;-)
My comment was intended 80% just for humor!
"it isn't that young people learn that much faster; it's just they have more time. When I would put time in, I made progress." - Dan Ingalls
There is also the fact that most of us don't know how to learn efficiently. For example, how many of us really know the current theories of memory and how we may exploit it to enhance our learning?
Also, a lot of stuff here: http://www.columbia.edu/~nvg1/Wickelgren/
But what may have influenced my life the most is this book: http://www.amazon.com/Your-Memory-How-Works-Improve/dp/15692...
I for one am convinced that the next frontier is our mind. Information is free - it's your ability to digest it that's the bottleneck. Also, we don't really know a lot about how skills such as creativity, hypothesizing patterns from specific examples, etc. can be systematically learned.