When I was around 6 years old, I took my first piano lessons at this old rustic house in Palisades Park, New Jersey, along with my younger sister. Our teacher would teach us the notes and some basic piano techniques. I remember the cover of that yellow Hanon book (tattered, by usage of all her other students). At the end of our lesson, she would give me and my sister red and white peppermints wrapped in plastic - this was a weekly occurrence until our teacher had to move and we got a new teacher, this time located in the highest floor of a large apartment building. The piano was an aged Yamaha and our new teacher was similarly enthusiastic about teaching, but neither I nor my sister had any interest in playing piano anymore. By the time I started the 3rd grade, I asked my parents if I could quit and me, along with my sister who did the same thing as I did, got to quit piano.

This was around the same time that I began learning judo, again, with my sister. Every Thursday, after my dad finished work, he would drive us to a dojo in a corner road, drop us off for an hour or so, and come back. The judo teacher was a family friend and on some days, my dad would come back to see us with a different colored belt. Like the piano however, I didn’t really find judo any interesting, and my parents, who couldn’t leave my sister alone, allowed us to quit. In some sense, our afterschool activities were mostly a form of “professional daycare”.

This was pretty common however: my sister and I did ballroom dancing, we quit that after a month; got tutored by an old fashioned Korean math tutor, we quit that after 2 or so years. One of the only activities that I did by myself began around the end of primary school up until middle school, where I grudgingly played baseball as a 1st baseman as well as a right outfielder. I didn’t like baseball enough to put in the effort but because of my habit of quitting, didn’t want to quit either to disappoint my parents. They always showed up to my games, until the end of middle school, when I quit.

Later, I picked up fencing and guitar: the guitar I quit after around a solid year of playing, and listening to the recordings I still have, I was decent - but my fingers began to hurt too much and I didn’t want to deal with it anymore, so I left my guitar on the stand and never picked it up at some point. Of course, fencing too left my life (to be fair however, the coach was sort of money/prestige-driven and only cared about fostering young talent for the Jr. Olympics / Olympics).

In middle school, however, my friend played me a solo cello rendition of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini Variation 18 - and it inspired me to pick up the piano again. To my surprise, I ended up really enjoying piano and it’s the only thing from highschool that I can carefully say that I really worked hard on.

Now in university, I realize the amazing privilege I had: the privilege of being able to quit. To my parents who let me quit, they gave me the privilege to quit and then try something new. If you made it this far, I’m not saying you should quit whenever you feel like it - rather, you should recognize the privilege you have when you say that you want to “quit” something (usually, this privilege also allows you to start something else). For me, I was fortunate to have found the piano and mathematics, and in all sense that seems reasonable, the privilege of quitting also sparked my enthusiasm for learning new things.