Last month I changed my job description. I'm now officially a Happiness Teacher . I teach happiness in the form of playing the piano. Happy people learn more easily, are more resilient, are able to deal with adversity better, and, in general are more fun to be around. Who doesn't want to be happier? Arthur Brooks, a professor at the Harvard Business School and happiness researcher has a podcast, Office Hours (check it out on youtube here ) I have been listening to it for a while, and have...

How are you with transposition? I wasn't good before I started with the chord and scale cards. Now I'm a lot better. I can play a lot of things in different keys, but, I couldn't take a piece of music and transpose it on the fly. . . until now. 3 years ago, I created piano key finder cards. One of the cards is a key name card. Align the black keys with the black strips on the cards, and they keys practically name themselves. Key names moved up, so when I play in "C" I'm actually playing in E...

Happiness, I am moving my company in the direction of happiness. Care to join me? Happiness is playing music, teaching music, playing with others, and helping my students find the same sense of delight I get when I play. Over the holidays my reading list was filled with Brené Brown (Strong Ground), Arthur Brooks (The Happiness Files), Simon Sinek (Start with Why), Donella H. Meadows (Thinking in Systems), Charles Mackesy (Always Remember), and Robin Ha (Cook Korean!). These brilliant people...