So Good They Can't Ignore You

by Cal Newport

Jordan picked up guitar at the same point in his life as I did. But by the time he graduated high school, he had been touring the mid-Atlantic with a group of professional bluegrass musicians and had signed his first record deal. When I was in high school, the acoustic group Nickel Creek was thought of, admiringly, by my grade’s music snobs as Dave Matthews for cool people. When Jordan was in high school, he regularly played gigs with their bass player, Mark Schatz. The question hanging over this comparison is why, even though we had both played seriously for the same amount of time, did I end up an average high school strummer while Jordan became a star? It didn’t take long into my visit with Jordan to understand the answer to this question. The difference in our abilities by the age of eighteen had less to do with the number of hours we practiced—though he probably racked up more total practice hours than I did, we weren’t all that far apart—and more to do with what we did with those hours. One of my most vivid memories of Rocking Chair, for example, was my discomfort playing anything I didn’t know real well. There’s a mental strain that accompanies feeling your way though a tune that’s not ingrained in muscle memory, and I hated that feeling. I learned songs reluctantly, then clung to them fiercely once they had become easy for me. I used to get upset when our rhythm guitar player would suggest we try out something new during band practice. He was happy glancing at a ch...