What subject or sport did you excel in in school, and how can you apply it to your practice?

I always got good grades in French. I worked hard, but I also loved it. And then because I loved it, I worked even harder. I remember drilling verb conjugations like a crazy person. Then, I loved it so much that I made sure I immersed myself in the language. After much hard work and some serious begging, my family saved up so that I could live outside of Versailles as an exchange student my junior year of high school. (Incidentally, I had the absolute honor and joy of studying with violist Paul Hadjage while I was there. Changed my life… more on that later.) There are lessons from my French studies that I apply to my music practice almost every day.

We’ve all heard that study after study shows that music students get higher scores on standardized tests. It’s true: there are skills we learn in this discipline that help us in other subjects. (Music has a unique math-meets-poetry essence that I have yet to encounter in any other discipline… it just makes us better thinkers, n’est-ce pas?) But now I’m suggesting that the inverse is true, too: we all have things we are good at in other areas of life that we can use to inform our practice. So here’s what I ask myself: what are you great at, and what can you teach yourself because of it?