Above: That’s Dave on the far right, performing in Herald Square with (from left) my NYC Guitar School business partner Jen, me, student Sophie—and teacher Dylan Charles on the snow mountain. We were playing “On Broadway”… on Broadway! (Photo by Malik Chatman)
Today’s guest post comes from Dr. Dave Popple—a successful entrepreneur, organizational psychologist, and an inspiring guitar student, too!
Over the past few months I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Dave at Song Labs, masterclasses, and other NYC Guitar School events. He’s the kind of student every musical community hopes for: curious, generous, and always looking for ways to help others learn. Dave has hosted practice sessions for fellow students at his home and helps keep the momentum going in a Level 7 guitar WhatsApp group he and his classmates started.
In his professional life, Dave built an online assessment system that helps organizations evaluate people for hiring and promotion. His newest venture, Telleus, aims to democratize coaching by making it available to anyone who wants it. And as he’s worked his way through the NYCGS guitar curriculum, he started noticing fascinating parallels between how people learn music and how people grow in life and leadership—especially that frustrating feeling of getting stuck.
The reflection below grew out of those observations. I think you’ll enjoy it.
🙂 – Dan
More info on Dave here: www.psynetgroup.com
Getting Stuck Is Part Of Getting Going
by Dr. Dave Popple
Understand The Rhythms Of Change
You picked up the guitar because something pulled you toward it. Maybe a song stopped you cold. Maybe you watched someone play and thought, I want to do that. You started lessons or taught yourself, and for a while, every practice session delivered visible progress.
Then it stopped. And you started wondering whether you had any talent at all.
Change has two rhythms, and most people recognize neither. Which is why so many guitars end up in closets after three months — not because the player lacked ability, but because nobody told them what was actually happening.
The First Rhythm: Progress and Regression
During my undergraduate program, we ran a simple experiment. Participants assembled and disassembled bar puzzles while we measured their speed. Trial after trial, their times improved — steady, predictable gains that traced a clean upward curve.
Then something strange happened.
Each participant hit a moment where their performance collapsed. Their hands fumbled. Their timing slowed. They looked as though they had forgotten everything they had just learned. If you watched without context, you would have assumed they were starting over.
They were not starting over. When they recovered from the glitch, they improved faster than before. The collapse was not a failure. It was a pivot — the point where their brains reorganized what they knew into something more efficient.
This pattern repeated across every participant. Progress, then regression, then accelerated progress. The learning curve was never a smooth line. It was a rhythm: climb, stumble, climb higher.
You will experience this with the guitar. You will nail a chord transition on Tuesday — smooth, clean, no buzzing. By Friday, your fingers will land in the wrong place every time. The shape you had memorized will feel foreign in your hand. You will stare at the fretboard like you have never seen it before.
That regression is not a sign that you have lost what you learned. It is a sign that your brain is rebuilding how it stores the movement. Your fingers are not forgetting. They are reorganizing — replacing slow, deliberate placement with something faster and more automatic. The stumble is part of the climb.
The Second Rhythm: Growth and Plateau
Zoom out from that single stumble, and a second rhythm emerges. This one moves slower and feels heavier.
The first weeks of playing guitar deliver constant rewards. You learn your first chord. Then a second. You strum a recognizable song for the first time and feel a rush that nothing else quite matches. Then weeks pass where nothing seems to improve. Your fingers know the shapes, your strumming stays steady, yet you sound exactly the same as you did fourteen days ago. You start to wonder whether this is as far as you go.
It is not as far as you go. You have hit a plateau.
Kurt Lewin, one of the founders of modern psychology, described change as a three-phase process: unfreeze, move, refreeze. A person must first destabilize what exists before anything new can take hold. Those early wins — the first chords, the first song — are the unfreezing, the thrill of entering new territory. The plateau is the refreeze, the period where your muscles and your mind absorb what they have learned before they can absorb anything more.
Evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge observed this same rhythm in nature and called it punctuated equilibrium. Species remain stable for long stretches, then transform in rapid bursts, then stabilize again at a new level. The plateaus are not stagnation. They are consolidation — the organism integrating what it has become before it can become something else.
Your playing follows this identical pattern. The plateau feels like nothing is happening. Beneath the surface, everything is happening. Your chord shapes are migrating from conscious effort to muscle memory. Your sense of rhythm is settling into your body. The progress you cannot hear is preparing you for the next breakthrough you cannot yet imagine — the moment barre chords suddenly click, the afternoon a song flows out of you without thought.
Two Rhythms, One Truth
The first rhythm operates inside each phase of growth — the micro-cycle of progress and regression, where your brain dismantles a clumsy movement pattern to build a fluid one. The second rhythm operates across phases — the macro-cycle of rapid improvement followed by long stretches of apparent stillness.
Together they reveal the same truth. Learning guitar does not move in a straight line. It holds, ruptures, reorganizes, and holds again. Every plateau prepares the next leap. Every regression carries the seeds of the next advance.
The players who get good are not the ones who avoid the plateau or escape the regression. They are the ones who recognize these rhythms for what they are — not signs of failure, but the sound of their playing reshaping itself — and pick up the guitar again tomorrow or join us in class.
Recently a Gen Z friend asked me one of those classic questions: What’s your secret to success?
At first, I hesitated. I had never really thought of myself in those terms. But after a moment, the answer came to me:
“Don’t be afraid to be the dumbest kid in the class.”
When I first came to NYC Guitar School, I struggled just to get through the warm-up exercises. Sometimes something would click in class—but then I’d go home and forget it. I learned the “Wish You Were Here” riff… but couldn’t play it for my wife later that evening.
If I had focused only on those frustrating moments, I might have quit. Instead, I took the longer view: graduation after graduation—Levels 4, 5, and 6—and now I’m approaching Level 7.
This pattern has shown up throughout my life.
I entered my PhD program as the only student without a master’s degree. I treated trauma victims despite never experiencing similar events myself. I worked with gang members in the inner city even though I grew up in a quiet town of 50,000 people. Later, I moved into corporate psychology without ever having run a business.
There are advantages to being the dumbest kid in the class—even at age 60.
And it should never stop any of us from going all in.
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