I like that a lot! What a great teacher the writer must be.
His comments about teaching math can be applied to so many subjects. His introductory examples using music and painting are good ones. But I decided I didn't want to do physics for a while after some exceptionally bad teaching late in grade school, which gave the clear impression that all was said and done, and at best one could look forward to just more of the same.
Another friend who had slogged through to get a PhD in physics was actually quite a creative circuit designer. But he was horrified that he was being an engineer when designing circuits, and that this was somehow just too mundane.
He then determined that he wanted to get way better at music. How to do this? Well, go back to school! He actually re-enrolled at another school as an undergrad, and fought through to get a music degree. He had to abandon a composition major when it became clear he wasn't gong to cut it, and wound up finishing up with Voice. At the end of all he confessed to me that his primary motivation was to get better than me (a sad thing to hear).
I had warned him that an early start in music helped a lot---but he evidently thought that meant an early exposure to rules and codifications, rather than listening and playing and hearing. He apparently assumed that to be able to play and write you had to have thoroughly embraced music theory, harmony, counterpoint etc., which although I'd done a bit of self-study on, had very little to do with what I wrote or improvised.
Once, at the end of a lengthy and excessive evening, behind substantial alcohol and other herbs and spices, I lapsed and misidentified a simple musical structure in a piece that we were listening to. I was corrected, and apologized for the lapse---but this guy had a huge Gedankenblitz, a veritable epiphany, and declared me to be a musical idiot savant. I was too reticent in those days to say F*#$ you!---I'm not an idiot to begin with! But it was clear he had permanently registered and classified me, on the basis of this rather anomalous evidence, and took great comfort in thinking that his admitted mediocrity and my seeming superiority were not the results of anything over which one had control---it was something genetic, neurological. He was absolved.