Music and sports, particularly team sports, have much in common. Both require nuanced physicality. There are similar patterns of practice for endurance and flexibility, performance under pressure, and overcoming disability and other goal-oriented learning. Athletes study strategy, musicians study insights into expressive performance. They both involve gear, special clothing, and related audio/visual paraphernalia for public performance.


Both draw audiences, and both make tons of money. Both involve intuitive applications of academic subjects, such as math and problem solving, and serve to make academic subjects seem real and useful. They even share shadows of illicit drug use and organized crime. For the makers, they share the requirement of near super-human monastic focus; for their fans, they provide cherished entertainment.

To varying degrees, both are taught in schools, both in grade school and at college. A question, though, is which one provides better preparation for life. What are the life lessons both teach their participants?

There is much written extolling the virtuous lessons we can learn from team sports: learning to communicate as a team, achieving goals, producing good work under pressure. But let’s take a look at some of the ways that the study and presentation of music might provide some unique benefits to its participants.

 

1. Adaptability. A musician typically plays in many types of situations. A guitarist might perform with a rock band, as a solo artist, in a chamber ensemble, with an orchestra, or with a chorus. He or she might perform live on stage in a formal concert, or at a pub for an impromptu jam session, or at a church service, as well as record albums, commercials, or film scores. But a team-sport player can just participate in a very specific structure, usually just on a specific type of team with a specific roster of personnel. So, musicians learn to be adaptable to a wide spectrum of scenarios, beyond their usual team and role.

1. Ease of reinvention. While musicians typically focus on a single instrument above all others, there are related undertakings that are also natural fits. A guitarist might also pick up similar instruments, such as electric bass, banjo, or ukulele. Many musicians of all stripes play a bit of piano. Musicians also commonly pursue more distantly related activities, such as songwriting, composition, or recording, and a great many musicians teach. Athletes may do some coaching, but they typically have fewer options.
2. Ease of collaboration. Beyond performing the primary repertoire of their primary job, professional musicians easily collaborate with new people. They might play an occasional gig outside their given style, or moonlight doing some session or commercial work, just to keep life interesting and gain some additional income: perhaps collaborating with dancers, or visual artists. Other than a pickup team just for fun, professional athletes stay focused on playing with the same group of people, all the time, just competing against different teams.
3. Less risk of injury. While there is risk of carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis for musicians, they rarely break bones or get concussions during the course of their usual activities—not even in the most raucous and out of control concerts. Fights rarely break out in concert halls. Obviously, team sports are far more dangerous, and the extent of the dangers of sports such as football are just coming to light. There is a common spirit in sports of performing through injuries, and even recklessness, which can result in permanent disability.
4. More inclusive to wider range of physicality. Making music requires acute physical prowess and subtle hand-eye coordination. However, the range of people who can participate is far greater in music than in team sports. Musicians can be blind and without all their limbs, and yet still create music. They can be elderly and have serious health conditions, and still continue to be active in the professional. Most professional team sports (and also solitary sports) are only available to the physical elite.
5. Career longevity. Because they overall physical requirements of music are less than team sports, musicians can participate for most of their lives. The career of an athlete might last at the most thirty years, and then, only in extraordinary cases. Musicians can be seen on stage from about age four to age one hundred plus. There is no planned obsolescence for musicians, but at a point, athletes must leave the field and become spectators.
6. Promotes literacy. The study of music includes the study of notation and theory, which is much like learning another language. In addition, many musicians will typically come across words in other languages, particularly Italian, German, and French. Those who engage in songwriting and singing must understand grammar, pronunciation, and nuances of meaning at a detailed level. Musical works are often based on other works of art, such as books or plays or visual art. Learning new music requires analysis akin to analyzing a text, as well as memorization. There aren't obvious equivalents in team sports, but these skills transfer easily to activities throughout many professions and general life activities.  
7. Better window into cultures and history. Musicians commonly perform music that comes from cultures beyond their own. Classical musicians will have intimate insight into art that was created throughout many centuries, from all around the world. A musician in a groove-based ensemble can easily learn to participate in countless world music contexts. 
8. Non-polarizing. Team sports are contents that end with a winner and with a loser. The goal is to crush an enemy, and sports rivals feel no joy in the triumphs of their opponents. In music, everyone wins. Go to a “battle of the bands,” and if the music is good, competing bands will cheerfully applaud each other. Fast-forward to greater lessons learned about life, from my perspective, the current polarity of public discourse is currently to everyone’s detriment, and the world is suffering greatly for it. Often, though, adherence to principles is more about following one’s surrounding culture than carefully analyzing and weighing competing ideas or ideologies. Political contests seem more closely aligned to the team sports model: most people stay loyal to their home team (democrats, republicans, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Americans, Palestinians, Israelites, North Koreans, and so on). And so, we are surrounded by stalemates, with neither side ready to yield turf. There is an assumption that the team of our home town is the best one, so most people just go with that, as they do when they root for the Yankees or Red Sox or Patriots or Jets.

 

For better or for worse, many who work in business share that polarity, with overly aggressive sales people (i.e., “sleazy sales guys”) trying to convince inappropriate consumers that they need things that in fact, they do not. This often results in one-off sales events and disillusioned buyers with no brand loyalty. So many companies are designed around the win/lose principle: prioritize the immediate battle over the ongoing relationship. A sale is “won,” with the seller triumphing when they squeeze the highest price from the buyer, regardless of the quality or actual production costs. Thus, we have industrial pollution on a worldwide scale, overpriced pharmaceuticals, unethical bankers, pesticide-ridden and tasteless food in our supermarkets, and so on, as the win of the profit generally triumphs over providing excellence to the consumer. It’s the prioritization of the win over the art, or of expressing truth and sharing insight into the human condition.

But imagine if instead, the paradigm for politics and governance and business and healthcare was instead music—if the goal was instead to find a common ground/groove that the widest possible audience could agree had a beautiful sound or a solid good groove. If everyone were to win. Wouldn't that seem a more productive mindset, rather than just wearing a team’s jersey and waving its flag?

Relatively few career paths truly require defeating a rival. Trial lawyers need to do it, as do those in the military, some scientists and engineers trying to find solutions to problems (e.g., cures for diseases), and perhaps some relatively sales practices hawking inferior products (e.g., bad mortgages, used cars, etc.). But most career activities are more about finding a win/win result, closer to the music model. We create and sell products and perform services that are to the benefit of a customer, so that they come back again. In most contexts, really, there is no enemy. There are just different people acting in different roles, and they all generally outlive their immediate transactions.

Sports are great. They are fun to play and watch, and they bring people together. They promote physical health, problem solving, working within frameworks of constraints, and collaboration. From bull fighting to boxing to football to cricket, they are deeply engrained in cultures worldwide.

They are also far more emphasized and better funded in American education than is the study of music—and in many scenarios, more than academic education itself.

It is worth considering the causal relationships between our systems of education and how the world’s grownups behave, and whether we would benefit by shifting the balance of how we view and study these two common pastimes.