I started playing guitar when I was thirteen. Since then, there has rarely been a day when I haven’t picked up a guitar and played for at least fifteen minutes. And although I have some fond memories of playing, I’ll never forget learning how to play guitar.

Because it sucked. A lot.

When you’re a kid, few prospects are as alluring as becoming an Effing Rock Star. The standard teenage dream is this: you form a band that plays awful music in your parents’ garage, thinking that someday a record executive might just happen to roll through your neighborhood, demand that his limo driver stop the car to investigate that intoxicating music coming from the white Colonial across the street, and sign you to a multi-million dollar record contract on the spot.

That kind of crap doesn’t happen in real life. No, friend, what you’ve signed up for is six months of finger-crippling pain the likes of which you haven’t experienced since you wrote four whole pages for the long answer portion of your American History midterm.

I’m talking about building calluses – literally hardening the skin on your fingertips so that you can press the strings firmly enough to play properly. Calluses are essentially scar tissue, tissue you build by slowly shredding flesh on metal guitar strings and letting it heal up again. Bryan Adams famously sang about playing guitar until his fingers bled. That likely wasn’t hyperbole.

Calluses are difficult to build, and not just because they hurt. See, for some people (people like myself), playing guitar is addicting. It’s a form of expression. There are so many rhythms and melodies out there, and we want to learn how to play them all. This is especially true in our early years, roughly the same time we find ourselves susceptible to finger fatigue. We want to play for hours at a time – but our fingers hurt too much to play. So we have to wait until our fingers heal, thinking the whole time about becoming an Effing Rock Star.

And that’s the part that sucks the most.

Building a career starts with shredding your fingertips. It starts with doing the mundane administrative things that make someone else’s job easier. You’re not going to be very good when you start, and you’re going to get hurt for doing something incorrectly. You’re going to have great ideas, and the hardest part of your job is going to be having to sit on them because “they” don’t want to listen, or don’t have the money, or don’t want to take the risk.

But you’re building calluses. And at some point your calluses will have built up to the point that you’re impervious to the pain of failure – or as impervious as a person can be. And when that happens, you’ll start to realize that you’re more prone to taking risks, to putting yourself in high-reward situations. And if you keep plugging away, eventually you’ll wake up one day and realize that you’ve already achieved what you set out to.

You’re an Effing Rock Star.