Barbara Oakley - Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential

Graham Keirs career switch from the music he adored to the math and science he had loathed came as a shock even to him. Nowadays, he couldnt be happier.

Or so he thought.

Even in grade school, Graham was obsessed with music. An upbeat child, he played violin from the time he was four, then nimbly expanded his repertoire by picking up the guitar at eight. In high school, the smoky world of jazz beckoned, and he began practicing this new freeform rhythm with nearly every breath he drew.

Graham lived just outside Philadelphia, once the home of jazz greats like Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Ethel Waters, and Dizzy Gillespie. In the evenings, he would slip away from the spacious yard of his familys old Victorian house right next to a train station and onto the clanking Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority R5 train. Disembarking onto the stained concrete in Philadelphia, hed step into the magical world of jazz clubs and live jam sessions. It was in listening to jazz that he came alive.

Eventually, Graham would train at two of the best conservatories, the Eastman School of Music and the Juilliard School, and he would be featured in DownBeat magazine as Best Soloist at the college level.

This wasnt to say that Graham was a success in every area of his life. Far from it. Pretty much anything that wasnt music-related was given short shrift. Math was a frustrationhe blundered through algebra and geometry and never touched calculus or statistics. His high school science record was lousy. After his final exam in chemistry class, he came home and burned all of his work in the fireplace, thrilled to have passed. The night before the SAT, while other college-bound students lay awake nervously reviewing proofs and Advanced Placement history, Graham, flaunting his academic mediocrity, went to a jazz concert.

Graham knew that he wanted to be a musician and that was that. Even the mere thought of math and science made him uneasy.

But then something happened. Not an accident, or a death in the family, or a sudden shift of fortune. It was something much less dramatic, which made the change all the more profound.