If guitar players could agree on one thing, it's that nothing is more frustrating than going through the learning stages of playing awkward bends, subpar vibrato, and... wait... what's a scale? Guitar, like many other instruments, is a challenge that feels completewhen one becomes immaculate, smooth, and clean.

When one can play perfectly. From there, we're free to craft phrases at will, like poets do with a mastery of language, or dancers do with control of various muscles. But what if being "perfect" was the very thing holding us back from perfection?

In the late 60's, one band that came before Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and others established the classic and heavy rock sound known today. That band was Cream. Eric Clapton on guitar, Jack Bruce on Bass, and Ginger Baker on drums. The band got together as early as 1966, while the Beatles had released Revolver, Ozzy had never eaten a bat's head (or had he?), and Jimmy Page was still in session recordings.

Cream had a simple motto, to forget the lyrics, forget the message, and just play. As the musicians considered finest within their craft they did what they wanted, nobody had known fifteen-minute live masterpieces, which we would see with later bands until Cream decided to walk up to the stage and just jam.

Clapton, one could say, was the image of perfection all guitarists aimed towards. Quickly search the phrase "Clapton is God" and you'll see what common English street graffiti of the time looked like. Give a quick listen to the solos on "Crossroads" live--from the album "Wheels of Fire"-- and you'll realize what perfect bends, precise timing, quite literally the absence of mistakes sounds like.

Clapton could phrase like a true bluesman and played like one with a day left to live. His touch conjured tones from fatty to thin, delicate to smashing, and all the more attacking and enthralling. In short, his sound had it all, and as a result, so did he. And in one night, you could say he lost it all.

Jimi Hendrix, a Seattle native, was playing shows in the United States around the time Cream came to the scene. Hendrix was discovered covering a song by The Leaves titled "Hey Joe," noticed by the former bass player of the Monkees, a good friend of Clapton and many other well known British musicians.

He would go on to manage Jimi, but before that brought him to a Cream gig in England and introduced Hendrix to the band. Hendrix did more than just that, he asked to jam with Cream. Now, he was pretty much unheard of, unknown, and a mere acquaintance but nevertheless the courtesy of English gentlemanhood did not fail him. Hendrix plugged into Bruce's bass amp. He proceeded to play a song Clapton regarded as too hard: Killing Floor.

There is no recording of this, but if you want to listen to Hendrix playing Killing Floor, I recommend the Live At Monterey concert, which is where he also lit his guitar on fire and smashed his drummers kit. Anyways, he rages through Killing Floor and Clapton's hand's drop. Divebombs, playing between the legs, over the head, just using the guitar truly as a part of his emotional expression, caused Clapton to not be able to light a cigarette.

From that night on Hendrix and Clapton were great friends, revering each other for their mutual greatness. Hendrix experienced much fame and success until his untimely death, a night that saw Clapton unable to gift him a white, left-handed Stratocaster which he brought to a Sly Stone concert only to take back home. The two loved each other.

Cool story! I'm more a piano guy, so who cares? Well, there are interesting psychological underpinnings to the Hendrix-Clapton relationship. Firstly, Clapton is the ideal. Everything we'd like to be, all we'd like to perfect, was what he represented from a guitarists perspective. So how was it that Hendrix managed to make the impression he made?

He didn't strive for the kind of perfection Clapton mastered, instead, he embraced his own experimental voice and tone. Look up a live video and watch Hendrix play for 30 seconds paying attention to his hands, his facial expressions, and his body language.

Hendrix is completely different in that he is almost terribly clumsy and messy, he knew the positions of notes and scales all too well and was very musically educated, but the way he played and held the guitar was not orderly or clean, for God's sake he played it literally upside down.

Hendrix is someone who constantly embraced his mistakes, and allowed his personality and authenticity to shine in the moments many of us would regard as "mess-ups" or "slip-ups." There is video of him playing Spanish Castle Magic live in Stockholm, which I regard for the very reason that the climax of the song is bridged by Hendrix completely abandoning the C Sharp scale and simply wrangling his hands (I really can't put it any other way) up the neck until he bends to a high note before bringing us back down.

If you watch the video, (the climax is around 4:30), it's hard to miss Hendrix's shift from formulated playing to going off the rails. Soon after the solo comes in, it seems he's making sounds that even he hasn't heard of. And that is what I'm trying to communicate.

Clapton's style, personality, and flow were his own. So was Hendrix's. What is unique to both is that they're very different in how they play, but something similar is that they're both their own and excellent. Clapton, like Hendrix, has mastered his own style and as a result is nearly perfect at bending and crafting phrases.

His style is smooth and masterful, very calculated and reliant on precision. Hendrix's style is much more about emotion. Hendrix draws from whatever sounds he can create, with his teeth, tongue, and hand at the string to play whatever it is that will pull the darkness of chaos into the light of his song. Clapton is ethos, Hendrix is pathos. Clapton is a Ferrari, Hendrix is a rocket on the back of a cheetah with wheels for legs.

Hendrix acknowledged constantly throughout his career, however, that much of his playing is centered around embracing mistakes. It seems foolish, to us, to consider much of his playing as holding "mistakes."

But Hendrix assured in interviews that he didn't want to rely on the structure and perfection that Clapton knew the way around, instead, he preferred something more personal and internally created as opposed to crafting attractive phrases from a given set of scales and sounds. Clapton was a master of creation, Hendrix a master of innovation.

What does this mean for us? Well, everything we do, we (if we take it seriously and come into something with a backbone) picture ourselves as Clapton--the ideal. Who tries something and thinks "well, I guess it'd be awesome to be sorta okay and mediocre at this"? If you do, let me tell you that you already have a different set of problems.

We try to be the ideal all we can. We try to be the ideal boss, partner, employee, family member, but it seems no matter what we try we're bound to trip up in life as easy as it is to pluck the wrong string or play a wrong note. Take a page from Hendrix and learn that mistakes aren't what define, or even what punctuate your life, but are simply what can make it fruitful for your personality and growth.

If Hendrix had hesitated, stuck to traditional scales and norms, played like a "good" player that anyone could be, would Hendrix mean the same that he means now? We love Hendrix because he played with his teeth, behind the back, and between the legs! Are those things "correct" or "mistakes?" Well, Hendrix would say they are what you make of them. Clapton never did any of them, so we know they aren't correct. Hendrix, however, did every single one, so what are we to make of them?

You will make mistakes. You'll get angry, you'll be a failure, you'll color outside of the lines, and you'll muck up a pretty picture. Within those moments, is a new path not opened? Is self-reflection and questioning not just worthy, but most present in opportunity at those very moments?

Mistakes are where we learn, but that doesn't mean it's where we close ourselves and shame our way into following another ideal we won't reach. Mistakes are where we can be proud that there is room to improve, but perhaps also that there is room for individuality within the structures we're boxed into.

You've got to know the rules before you can break them, and there's nothing majorly wrong with not breaking them. Clapton didn't break too many rules (compared to Hendrix), and he was still phenomenal. Hendrix, however, was not afraid to break scales, change keys, play with more than a pick and fingers, and do things we would classify into the bounds of "mistakes" because he classified them as parts of himself.

It's only in being who we really are, doing what we really can, and creating what we're meant to create, that we surpass the ideal we aim toward and find comfort in living with the mistakes that distance us from such an image. The same happens when you fall in love.

You go from "yes, this is the most perfect and error-free person in the world" to "wow, even though there is so much wrong with this person (along with so much that is also right, I'm not that cynical), I feel compelled by who they are so much so that I don't want to leave, and I'd even bear staying through the worst of moments if it meant that I could live through the best with them."

Well, live through your worst moments! Let them arise and show themselves, there is no shame in imperfection until you decide there is. An ideal is necessary, a tyrant is not. Being yourself is also necessary, but disregarding fundamental structures and rules of life is not. Finding a balance is key, obviously, but we've got to be open enough to change regarding our approach to mistakes if we desire the comfort that comes with the discomfort that is finding yourself.

Where would Monet be if he had aspired to have the brush strokes of David? Where would Chopin be if he attempted to have the simplistic perfection of Mozart? Where would Hendrix be if he said "I'm not Clapton. There is nothing else worth being." And where would you be, if you thought the same about yourself?