“I didn’t come here for a concert. I’m out.”
I overheard it in a hushed whisper behind me after the second song turned into the third song of the most delightful “keynote presentation” I’ve ever heard.
If I hadn’t been so thoroughly enthralled by the performance itself, I’d have rolled my eyes. I was too enraptured to even take out my phone to record.
This is a conference for leaders in K–12 online education. It’s the first keynote, and I (a lifelong guitar player) was intrigued when the emcee got up with multiple guitars adorning the stage behind him to welcome us to DLAC Ignite.
So when Luca Stricagnoli strolled on stage and flicked the mute off of his baritone guitar to reveal a deliciously deep open tuning that filled the room, I was admittedly as incredulous as the folks sitting behind me who felt the need to announce their exit to each other before excusing themselves from the room.
My reaction, though, was of the “you were picked to win a free car” variety—with a laugh and not even an ounce of exasperation.
Luca opened with back-to-back AC/DC hits, percussively playing acoustic guitar that layered together melody, chords, and the beat masterfully—showcasing a skill set that literally only a handful of people in the entire world can make even a passing claim to.
He’s on the Mt. Rushmore of percussive acoustic guitar legends, for sure.
I was hooked.
To the room’s credit, the vast majority of folks were just as hooked as me.
I kept expecting him to stop and go full LinkedIn “Here’s what percussive guitar can teach you about digital education” at any moment, but this was… just a show for him. Later in the day, I went and watched a few of his live performance videos on YouTube and confirmed that yes, this was his act. He told the same jokes as his regular set, and even set up songs in the same way.
So why have a keynote at a conference like this with ZERO reference to the conference itself, or to any of the pressing issues we all have gathered (and paid good money) to discuss?
The value of bringing in an object lesson in mastery is that it turned a moment where the room expected explication (at least) and application (at most) into a moment we were forced to provide our own.
And for a room filled to the brim with educators, it was a safe assumption that we’d do the work of finding application. The one bit of application that the emcee followed the presentation with was “your schools are full of Lucas…” and pretty much left us hanging to determine how we are going to unlock that potential energy.
What we saw on display in front of us in that room was at least these things, plainly and on the surface:
- A relentless pursuit of excellence.
- Not just pushing the limits of what is possible… ignoring them.
- Focused and undistracted practice.
I asked Luca in the breakout later (what a great idea!) how many hours he spends per day practicing guitar vs. doing all of the other things involved with monetizing a career in the music industry. He almost sheepishly responded that he feels guilty playing the guitar for more than 3 hours per day, so he has to limit himself to that to get other things done.
3 hours a day of dedicated practice at getting better. He’s already arguably the best in the world. But that drive to get better is what got him here. There’s an application point in there for our students.
I studied Luca there in the breakout room. In addition to a rock-solid grasp of a second (or third?) language, I noticed something else. Luca’s hands are shaped like nothing I’ve ever seen. He’s not a big guy by really any measure, except for finger length.
Luca’s overall hand size is probably no bigger than mine (though I am probably 5–6 inches taller than him). But if you measure just our palm size, I guarantee his are smaller. In addition to that, if he attempts to stretch his hand in such a way as to maximize the distance between his thumb and pinky, the angle formed by his ring finger and pinky approaches a 90-degree angle.
The man’s hands look as though they were custom-designed for doing mutant-guitar activities. Some of that is training, exercise, and putting in the work. But some of it is pure genetics. It’s how he was designed. I could practice for the same number of hours, but there’s not a drill in the world that will make my fingers longer.
Just like when you look at Michael Phelps, you see a man whose body looks to have been designed with peak swimming ability in mind, so too with Luca you start to see that this dude has some “advantages” that simply do not map 1:1 to hard work.
Related to this: Luca’s tools are custom-built for him. His “three-necked” custom guitar was literally built by measuring the distance from his elbow to his fingertips (complete with acrylic nails) to determine the angles of the frets, the angles of the necks, and where to place the percussive pickups in the machine.
If we are building tools that “work for everyone,” we might be missing out on tools that work for anyone. For more on this entire line of application, see the book “The End of Average” that rocked my world this past semester. My fear is that standardization is so deeply embedded in the minds of educators that it is nearly impossible to overcome the bias toward making all things “standard.”
How can our curriculum, educational model, and other contributing systems be modified to “specialize” instead of standardize? It’s never been easier to specialize. Where can we specialize in ways that scale?
The longer I think about that keynote presentation, the more application points I can come up with.
I’m supremely glad that Luca didn’t hop on stage and say “Here’s how I used AI to 10x my guitar output,” featuring 34 slides on how I could do it too.
If you excused yourself very early on once it became clearly “just a concert,” I fear you’ve missed an object lesson in engaging your brain in the ways we really need our students to. I’m so glad I didn’t.
