Kids and music lessons: why do many promising players quit early?

I don't mean playing together as an ensemble where the music is already written - though that is important. I mean PLAYING and improvising. Exploring. Simply having fun. Developing your ear, not only for your instrument, but how to listen and react to your collaborators. Making mistakes. Going off-road and being wildly experimental. That's such an important component of what makes music wonderful. Even if you don't have an audience to perform to, and even if you and your friends are objectively terrible it is FUN to express yourself and to synchronize with your friends and have a laugh when you do something satisfying.

As you all mature you become tuned-in to your band. You work as a unit. You surprise each other. You keep each other fresh. You learn to listen deeper and deeper. You discover ways to interpret the same composition several different ways. It becomes a playground.

Perhaps most importantly, there are ZERO RULES. Nobody dies if you play the wrong chord. So you go big. You learn to take risks and occasionally you surprise yourself with what's possible. Music (and perhaps art and creativity in general) demonstrate that so much in life is malleable. That things don't have to be a certain way. That most of it is open to negotiation.

"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

― Ira Glass

This seems to apply in other fields as well by the way; the correspondence to "the YOLO guy" for example is striking.