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Knowing what the brain requires for solid, long-term learning will help you get better at music, or anything else.
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.
I’d just spent more than three years poring over research on music practice, reading hundreds of peer-reviewed studies and dozens of popular books on practice, all of which pointed to deliberate practice as the holy grail of learning, musical or otherwise.
As we do, keep in mind the advice of martial arts master Bruce Lee, who said, “Absorb what is useful; discard what is not; add what is uniquely your own.”
If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. Wayne Dyer,
When the cortical fugal network senses new sounds, especially radically new sounds, it gets “confused” and can’t predict patterns from this new sound, emitting what’s called a prediction error signal. That new sound is, quite literally, noise. The signal hasn’t been parsed yet.
The cool thing is that if you hear that unfamiliar sound again a few times, the cortical fugal network begins to adapt to the new sound, finally reaching a point at which the sound is “recognized,” and all is cool again, as far as the cortical fugal network is concerned. Now you can attend to that sound more closely and understand it better because you’re perceiving it more clearly.
Deep, automatic, flawless muscle memory is built only by growing those connections in your neurons, and coating the “wiring”—the axons—with myelin.
Myelin is a fatty substance that thinly coats the axons, the slender conduits along which electrical signals pass from neuron to neuron. Myelin insulation coating the axons enables neurons to fire with more efficiency, speed, and precision.
If you are irritated by every rub, how can you be polished? Rumi, poet (1207-1273)
Your beliefs about talent shape your practice in a fundamental way.
Is musical talent something you’re born with? Is talent something you either have or you don’t? Is musical ability genetic, a gift that runs in your blood? Or is musical talent a result of practice?
The more a person believes music ability to be a fixed quantity, the more they tend to have a need to demonstrate they “have it.” People with a fixed idea about musical talent showed even stronger evidence of a need to avoid demonstrating they “didn’t have it.”
Talent is practice in disguise.
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.
More than half the challenge to good practice is just showing up to the practice room.
When in Doubt, Leave It Out One of the easiest ways I know to help with my own Ass-Power Index is to leave my instruments out and ready to play.
Lower Your Standards Setting easily achievable goals is probably the best way to enhance your Ass Power,
Setting goals “just right” is one of the most powerful and motivating techniques expert practicers use to get the most out of the practice session, even if you only have two minutes of practice time a day,
When I asked him if there was one thing he would teach his younger self about practice, he said, “I would try to make my goals more specific: short-term, long-term, and having a big vision of where you’re heading with it.” He teaches his students to set clearly defined, concrete goals. He said, “If there is no dream, and if there is no vision; that’s what we need for having motivation.”
Motivational guru Zig Ziglar said, “A goal properly set is halfway reached.”
Correctly setting goals takes some tinkering before you can dial it in. If you’re just starting out, it’s best to set easily achieved goals at first, until you have the experience to know when to push yourself a little harder.
Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. Carl Sandburg, poet (1878-1967)
Divide your life into 10-minute units and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity. Ingvar Kamprad, ikea founder (1926- )
Tools that give you an additional boost, allowing you to perform past your normal ability are known as scaffolds.
