A Thousand Tiny Problems

As I go from working on programming problems on my laptop to fiddling with a piece on the classical guitar, there's a through line that I couldn't articulate before rewatching the documentary based on guitarist Marc Ribot's work, The Lost String. (highly recommend both the documentary and music of Marc Ribot)

Therein, Ribot unearths the through line I fumbled with for so long:

When you learn on classical guitar, it's a way of working where you learn to take a big problem and learn to break it down into a thousand tiny problems and solve them one at a time. Classical guitar pieces are physical freaks of nature, I mean people shouldn't be able to do that kind of thing, and they do it by breaking it down into tiny steps and learning very slowly. So it's a certain approach that you can use elsewhere.