The Practice of Practice

by Jonathan Harnum

It definitely helps to be exposed to a lot of music at an early age.”

Researchers have found that many professional musicians’ early experiences with practice were pleasant or fun.3 It stands to reason that if practice is pleasant or fun early on, we’ll want to do more of it. A good thing to remember if you’re a beginner of any age, or a parent.

Whatever gifts have been given or withheld from you, practice is still the only way to get better at anything: music, chess, sports, programming, parenting.... Anything.

Rex, Sona, and Prasad are talented because they have practiced, and because they continue to practice. Diligently. Rex said, “There is no such thing as maintenance. If you’re not trying to get better, you’re getting worse.”

Talent is practice in disguise.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views...cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.2

“There is nothing more serious than having fun.”

When great musicians practice, they go slowly enough that errors are avoided. When an error does crop up, expert practicers fix those errors immediately. That’s the strategy: fixing a mistake immediately. Anybody can do it, and anybody who adopts that strategy will get better faster than those who don’t.

If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

“The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.” This is brain plasticity in action. Without brain plasticity, all practice would be futile.

“My parents took me to hear the Chicago Symphony around age two or three.”

it’s good to remember the GIGO principle: Good In = Good Out.

Practicing slowly enough to avoid mistakes is probably the single most difficult thing for beginners to do. It can be a challenge for more seasoned players as well. I’m a long way from a beginner and I still have to remind myself to slow down when I practice. How do I know? That’s easy. If I’m making any mistakes at all, I’m going too fast.

One reason it’s so difficult to practice slowly enough is that slowing down is the opposite of our desire: we want to learn something quickly and be able to play it well as soon as possible.

If you flub a passage the same place every time and don’t take measures in your practice to fix it immediately (or better yet, go slowly enough to avoid the mistake in the first place), the myelin will blithely coat the neurons, reinforcing the actions that result in the mistake.

Expert practicers know this, and avoid making mistakes to begin with by practicing very slowly. Expert practicers listen carefully and immediately address errors when they crop up.

“You’ll never make a mistake if you never make a mistake.” Practice slowly enough that a mistake is impossible.

Success is moving from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

Beginning practicers are like early attempts to find exoplanets using the wobble method. Beginners often can’t perceive errors unless they’re big ones, massive clams that cause the musical endeavor to come crashing to a halt. At this point, beginning practicers usually compound the error by returning to the top of the tune for another attempt, instead of fixing the error immediately, like experts do.

as we gain musical ability, we’re able to hear smaller, subtler errors.

It’s a good idea to point out here that you have to be looking for the errors! Beginners often don’t do this. It’s part of what it means to be an active listener.

that’s what good practice is all about: being hyper-aware of where we’re failing and addressing those failures in our practice.

If you search out failures and their causes in your practice, you’ve turned “failure” into “learning,” and in a very real way, you’ve turned dross into gold. If you’re actively listening, and acting on what you hear, to fail is to learn. Jazz trumpeter Ingrid Jensen said, “That’s what practice should be about: exposing our tendencies to ourselves so that we can fix them.”

The goal is to convert the territory of failure into the territory of opportunity.

How you feel about failure is closely linked to your theories about intelligence and talent. Your unspoken notions about talent and intelligence profoundly affect how you react to failure when it happens (and it will happen). In fact, your unspoken beliefs about talent and intelligence also affect your motivation to learn in the first place.

People with a growth mindset understand that failure is a form of assessment telling you that you need to work harder, or approach the problem from a different angle. Failure is an opportunity to learn for someone with a growth mindset, not an example of your fundamental lack of intelligence.

Those with a growth mindset also tend to seek out challenges, they tend to persist in the face of failure, and they adopt deeper learning strategies, because their goal is mastery of the subject, not acquiring the label of “smart” in order to support the ego. So what does this have to do with music, and motivation to practice?

On the other hand, those with a growth mindset of musical ability tend to seek out challenges, persist in the face of setbacks, and seek out feedback. People with a growth mindset of musical ability see effort as the key to gaining more talent.

But if you do need to make some changes, realize it will take attention, concentration, and practice to move toward a more growth-oriented belief about musical talent.

Beware of praise for your talent or ridicule for your lack of talent. Don’t buy into the idea that talent is a genetic gift that is fixed and unvarying. Talent is practice in disguise. If you teach, beware of talent-based praise. Even one little phrase is enough to change behaviors (see the Extension at the end of the chapter).

When you come up against an obstacle, when things get difficult, carefully examine how it makes you feel, or the ways in which you might avoid the obstacle. What are you actually trying to avoid? Come up with three ways to tackle the challenge. Do them.

When you make a mistake during a performance (and I mean when, not if ), how does it make you feel? Take note of the mistake. Put it at the top of your list of things to focus on in your next practice session. Keep performing the music until you get it right.

No matter what musical situation you find yourself in, adopt the mindset of the novice: you’re there to learn, to take everything in, and to remain open to the experience. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”4

Plumb your musical past to find a scenario in which you were either judged harshly or roundly praised for your musical talent. Feel it fully, whether painful or pleasant. Now adopt a growth mindset. That experience doesn’t define your musical ability. Ask yourself what you can learn from that experience. Move forward.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. What are you afraid of? It’s just music. Focus on that. It’s really no big deal, and certainly not life-threatening, unless you’re a member of plutonium-rock band Disaster Area. Consider what world-renowned flute player Sir James Galway said: “I do not consider myself as having mastered the flute, but I get a real kick out of trying.”5

Focus on mastering the music as deeply as you can, and worry less—or not at all if it’s possible—about impressing others with your musical prowess. That’s a losing strategy.

Ass Power is the ability to sit your butt down in the chair and get to work, and the willpower and commitment to keep your butt in the chair to get things done.

Setting easily achievable goals is probably the best way to enhance your Ass Power, because with a small, specific goal in mind, you’ll be more likely to sit down in that chair, even if only for a few minutes. Goals are so important for motivation that a whole chapter is devoted to the topic.

My brain becomes a vacuum up there. That’s the nice thing about it. I can completely get away from myself and anything else when I’m playing. It’s unfortunate those times when you discover you’ve gone too far and you can’t use your mind to bring yourself back, but when it does work, it’s very nice.

The flow state has often been described like a drug, but with none of the annoying side-effects like hangovers, poor health, or incarceration.

The sweet spot—known as a “flow channel”—happens when your abilities are perfectly matched with the challenges of the task. The better your skills become, the more challenging the task needs to be for you to enter the flow state.

Flow doesn’t happen in practice, or at least not usually. Flow is actually the antithesis of good practice. Conscious attention to detail is essential for practice, and that’s not possible in the flow state.

“Practice and playing music has to be like a religious experience. It has to be your religion, you know; it has to be your trance. You get something from a devotion to it and digging deeper into yourself and the nature of reality.

“My goal every time I perform is to lose myself, to lose my ego and let the music just take me wherever it goes.” She said, sometimes she’ll go into a practice session with no other goal than that: to lose herself in the music. She said, “It’s definitely what keeps me wanting to play.” Every now and then, the best practice is play.

By the Yard—Life is hard. By the Inch—Life’s a cinch.1

The Goldilocks Zone is a place where everything is just right.

Setting your goals “just right” will do wonders for your motivation, because setting the appropriate goal means success. Nothing motivates like success.

“If there is no dream, and if there is no vision; that’s what we need for having motivation.”

Goals come in many shapes and sizes. They’re like fractals. At the largest scale, there is a pattern, and as you dive in and look more and more closely at goals, they reflect that larger pattern, even at the microscopic level.

Stating your goals publicly can actually sabotage your progress, making it harder to achieve your goal.