As a child, journalist J.R. Patterson spent 11 years as a violin student. He loved music.

But that love didn’t transfer over to his lessons. In fact, he writes:

“Each week, from the age of six to 17, I’d spend the hour-long drive it took to reach those lessons imagining events that might preclude me from playing that afternoon — and perhaps forever: I’d fall suddenly ill; I’d realize I had forgotten my violin at home; there would be a pileup on the highway. As we got nearer, I’d wonder if I could make jamming my fingers in the car door appear like an accident.”

At the behest of his mother, Patterson endured the lessons.

As his final concert approached, though, he finally rebelled. He quit without notice.

For the performance, Patterson had practiced Mozart’s Violin Concerto no. 3 in G Major with a Sam Franko cadenza. But he “skipped the concert, didn’t perform the Mozart Concerto, never mastered Franko’s cadenza.”

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Like 400,000 other children, J.R. Patterson learned to play the violin through the Suzuki Method.

Named after founder Shinichi Suzuki, this approach to music emphasized nurture over nature. Suzuki argued that anyone can become a violinist with the proper musical instruction.

Yet, he wasn’t trying to produce world-class musicians. Instead, he viewed the violin as a means to an end. He believed that “small children are surprisingly capable of learning difficult things if they’re motivated by their own curiosity and someone else’s enthusiasm.” And that experience eventually can help them to “fully realize their potential [in any field] and become enlightened individuals.”

“This method is not education of the violin,” Suzuki told a journalist in 1977. “It is education by the violin.”

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Suzuki’s beliefs relied in part on significant support, encouragement, and enthusiasm from parents and teachers.

However, Suzuki biographer Eri Hotta wrote in a Wall Street Journal article:

“To his dismay, however, he soon realized that his biggest challenge would be parents, who often ‘unknowingly made their children miserable.’ Rather than guide their children to become the best people they could be… those parents became narrowly focused on raising ‘skilled violin players.’

He believed this was a result of a lack of self-reflection on the part of adults, who lost sight of why they wanted their children to learn to play musical instruments in the first place.”

As the Suzuki Method gradually spread around the world, its founder’s “social mission largely disappeared.” Interference from parents and teachers heightened the emphasis on “formality,” “uniformity,” and “rote memorization.” Effectively, they reduced the entire concept to nothing more than a “system of musical instruction.” And in doing so, they lost the “real point, which is about human potential.”

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Shinichi Suzuki’s experience with the violin mirrors our own experiences with money.

To our dismay, the environment in which we make financial decisions often makes us miserable. We’ve learned to narrowly focus on numbers alone. We’ve reduced money to a uniform set of financial rules and benchmarks. We chase widely-prescribed savings rates, tax breaks, and retirement milestones because we’re told that we should.

Put differently, we’re guided to live according to a spreadsheet.

Patterson, the former child violinist, said of his experience with the Suzuki Method, “If there were a secret to mastering an instrument, it was only ‘practice and practice of the right things.’ But rote memorization and emphasis on practice over anything else left little room for improvisation or imagination. …There was no part of me in the sound I was making.”

What an apt description of many of our financial decisions as well.

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Applied to our finances, the Suzuki Method teaches us not to live for money, but to live through money.

Most of us aren’t trying to reach the end of our lives with as much wealth as possible. Instead, we view our money as a means to an end. We want to use our money to create the lives that we dream about for ourselves and our family.

In the same way that our approach to an instrument like the violin might help us to better realize our human potential, our approach to money might help us to better realize our ideal life.

Adam Gopnik wrote when discussing Suzuki in the New Yorker, “What matters most is not making music but finding meaning in music.” And something similar happens when we lose sight of money’s ultimate purpose. We then also lose out on the comforts, joys, and memories that money can make possible.

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A few years after JR Patterson quit his violin lessons, he attended a concert featuring a violinist from the same town where he once practiced. And on the program that night was that same piece of music – Mozart’s Concerto in G Major with the Franko cadenza – that Patterson had abandoned.

Patterson writes, “Halfway through the first movement, (the professional violinist) flubbed a short fill of notes. It was brief but unmistakable. Then the moment passed, his fingers gliding over the error as if nothing had happened.

In that brief moment, I caught a glimpse of his face. It was lit with a smirk.”

We should be so lucky as to learn to take that same joyful approach to our money.

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About the author: Kevin Mahoney, CFP®

Hi, I’m Kevin. I’m a financial advisor in Washington, DC. I’m also the founder of Illumint, an independent financial planning company in the District that specializes in financial planning for Millennials like you. I empower our generation with the confidence to invest an inheritance, financial gift, or extra savings. If you’re new to Financially Well, welcome – you now have access to the leading finance podcast for Millennials. I encourage you to read, watch, or listen to the ideas I’ve shared about making your money work for you. And then when you’re ready, please send me your thoughts & questions!