Time & Perspective Quote by Virgil Thomson

Thomson’s rule-of-three is less self-help poster than a composer’s practical rebellion against preciousness. In music, you don’t “know” a piece because you admire it; you know it because your hands have made the mistakes, corrected them, and lived through the boredom on the way to competence. The quote is a workflow disguised as wisdom: fear is treated as a mechanical obstacle, not a profound psychological identity. Do it once and the mystique collapses. Do it twice and you’ve built the basic muscle memory. Only then are you allowed the luxury of taste.

That last move is the subtextual jab. Thomson refuses our culture’s favorite shortcut: deciding you don’t like something before you’ve paid the entry fee of effort. “Figure out whether you like it” comes third because liking, for him, isn’t a pure gut reaction; it’s an informed judgment that arrives after contact, friction, and a little humility. He’s also quietly protecting curiosity from ego. The first attempt threatens the self-image (“What if I’m bad?”). The second threatens the narrative (“What if this is hard?”). The third is where honesty can finally show up.

Context matters: Thomson came up in a 20th-century art world that prized newness but demanded rigor, and he was famously skeptical of grandiosity. This is anti-romanticism in compact form: art, skill, even preference are earned through repetition. The brilliance is how it turns commitment into a small, bounded experiment. Three tries. Not forever. Enough to get past performance anxiety and into reality.