Talent. That’s what I heard on a rainy day in a Tribeca loft when Chris Colton got lost in playing the piano for 10 minutes. He seemingly melted effortlessly into his song and totally transcended reality into what seemed like another realm—quite a sight to see.

I asked Colton what got him started in music, “I owe the credit to my father for putting a piano right next to my bed. So it would be dishonest to claim that there wasn’t some degree of influence that was kind of thrust upon me by him. My father was a great aficionado of music. Like he really cared about it. But he really didn’t have any formal training. And my mother was a figure skater. I started playing the piano when I was eight, and I started ice skating from the time I was one. I was kind of being groomed for both simultaneously, but I realized I liked music.”

Chris comes from a long line of visionaries, “My dad was a photo editor and photographer for Time Magazine, my uncle worked for Sports Illustrated, my grandmother was the first art director of Life Magazine, and my grandfather was a photographer for the Associated Press, so I came from all of this visual art talent.”

With all of the creative blood in his family, I asked what specifically made him realize music was the path to choose, “So I don’t think I was born to do it. I don’t think I was born to do anything. I’ve never felt that feeling. I envy those who are so talented that it just runs through their veins. I don’t have perfect pitch. I have relative pitch that I train myself to have. I think music stuck because I had this innate desire to play with time. With music, you can paint time. Like time is required.”

Hearing him say this, I gravitated towards the idea of “playing with” or “painting” time. I urged him to elaborate, “When you see a painting or a photograph, it hits you all at once. And there is still a narrative there, and there’s a sense of duration of time in it, but in a more abstract way. But dance, cinema, and music require time; if you have a five-minute song and compress it into an instant, you wouldn’t get the story; it would just sound like a bunch of noise. Or, if you were to watch a whole dance routine simultaneously, it would look like a bunch of chaos. You can glance at an image and walk by it, and maybe you captured some of the essence of it, and maybe you didn’t, but it’s all there all the time, all at once. If you want to hear a piece of music, you have to actually endure the entire song.”

Chris took his talent to others and started teaching piano at the end of high school and into college. After he graduated college, he began teaching private lessons and has worked with over 100 students throughout the past five years. Additionally, Colton recently started to teach piano to young children as a music teacher at a local school.

Before his teaching journey, Chris went to the famed LaGuardia High School in New York City, where he played trumpet and piano. At the time, Chris played a lot of Rock inspired music; however, following high school, he went to Canada and attended McGill University. At McGill, Colton decided to major in something he was not used to and bit out of the box- jazz music. He was one of only five piano players in his grade; he explained, “And the question became why did I choose a major in something that I inherently might not be good at, why wouldn’t I play to my strengths? And I always say, practice your weaknesses. I think music makes me a better person. I play music because I need to.”

Practicing your weakness is not a natural thing to lean into; I feel many people tend to rely on their strengths to get them through life. So I asked him where he got this idea to start making it a habit to be comfortable with his weaknesses, “Gandhi of all people. When I was about 18, I started writing with my left hand, and I started shaking people’s hands by shaking their right hand and then putting it in my left hand. And they would say, ‘No, that’s bad luck!’ And I would say, ‘I’m practicing my weaknesses.’ So I started writing the alphabet with my left hand because the first time I wrote my name with my left hand as a young adult, I was so severely disappointed. I looked like I was in kindergarten and realized half of my body was inept. Practice your weaknesses, but play to your strengths. To put it to an athletic example, the game is not the time to practice your weaknesses. The game is to play to your strengths, and when you’re practicing and not playing, practice the things you are not good at.”

I was impressed by his commitment to admitting the things he is not good at and his desire to become fixated on perfecting them. Imagining that in order to get really good at a weakness, it would take an incredible amount of focus on that weakness to begin to improve it, I asked him what his philosophy was, “I think it’s really key that someone learns one thing really well and then finds the interdisciplinary modes of the mind that can extrapolate those themes from and apply them to other things. Like I’m not going to be Glenn Gould, I’m not going to be the greatest jazz musician ever, or anything like that, but the skills that I developed in the pursuit of becoming a musician will enable me to learn other things way more rapidly. Like once you get really good at one thing, you can start to see how other things that seem completely opposite of that thing become quite similar. Like what do a football player and a ballerina have in common? Well, quite a lot, actually.”

In just this short time talking to Chris, it was clear that he has a bright mind and a lot to share; both qualities that I feel make for a fantastic teacher. I asked him why he continues to teach, “I’ve always loved teaching because I learn from the process of it. I love helping others and the community, but selfishly I learn so much from it myself.”

I asked him what it is like working with children, “The most obvious truths are very elusive. Truth is spoken from the mouth of babes, kids have a way of pointing out things, and you’re just like, huh.” He continued, “The reason I teach is that, on the one hand, it feels good to give back, but the real reason is it keeps me young. I like to be an old man in a young body, and hopefully, when I get old, I will preserve the naivete and the novelty of youth. I want to be an old man with baby eyes and then a baby with old man eyes; so I can be wise while I’m young and foolish when I’m old.”

I have been lucky enough to call Chris a friend over the past few years and have taken piano lessons from him myself. I love the way he approaches teaching and the relationship he has with his instrument. He always says, “To me, the piano is a vessel. It is a double entendre like both a vessel as a physical being and also a vessel for catharsis and emotional expression.”

You can find Chris on Instagram at @chrisnorthcolton.