Wanting it is the easy part

A young guitarist in Amman has been playing for six years, and he is frustrated. He wants to be the musician people call for the evenings that matter. The phone does not ring.

When a goal stays out of reach, there are only a few honest explanations, and they get harder to hear as you go down the list.

The first is that the goal itself is the problem. It depends on luck, or on doors that are closed to people from where he started, or nobody in his position has ever reached it. If that is true, the answer is to pick a different goal or to hold this one more loosely.

The second is that the goal is fine and the timing is not. Careers like his take longer than anyone admits, and a few breaks only come after years of showing up. If that is true, the answer is patience, and more of it than he would like.

The third explanation is the most common and the least welcome. He is waiting for the world to recognise work he believes is already finished. He plays the songs he likes, the way he likes them, and he has decided that the gap is everyone else's fault.

Closing that gap usually means doing the parts he skipped. Learning the songs the hosts actually ask for. Arriving early and staying calm when the sound is bad. Answering messages the same day. Noticing what the room needs and giving it before anyone asks. None of this is glamorous. Much of it is emotional work, the kind that leaves you tired in a way practice never does.

The people who get from where he is to where he wants to be rarely have more desire than he does. They have simply stopped insisting that their current way of working is good enough.

Wanting it badly was never going to be the thing that got him there.