Phone calls. Incoming texts. Family. Friends. Facebook. TV shows. Traffic signals. Crosswalk signals. Cat videos. Video games. Work emails. Homework. Errands.
In our daily lives, you and I get pulled in dozens of different directions at once. It’s easy to fall out of touch with the creative pastimes that are most important to us as songwriters and musicians.
Mastery at any creative craft depends on time and patience and careful effort.
Information overload has become the norm, and we live under constant bombardment from smartphones, computers, and advertising. Out of self-defense, we learn to rush through things. We take shortcuts. Instead of reading, we learn to skim and scan.
And the slow, effortful things, like learning the finer points of lyric structure? We may have the best intentions in the world to spend time on them, but in the face of life’s constant bombardment, it’s all too easy to procrastinate and let opportunities to practice slip away.
Start Today
“I’ll practice more when things quiet down,” I’ve caught myself saying many times.
Every time I catch myself saying that, I remind myself that things never settle down. Not unless you take active steps to settle them down yourself.
Next time you catch yourself delaying songwriting and practice until “tomorrow” or “sometime next week”, remind yourself that tomorrow’s going to be busy, too. If you don’t feel like writing this week, you won’t feel like it next week either. And each day, once it’s gone, is gone forever.
I’m sorry to remind you of this, but sooner or later we all run out of tomorrows.
The instant gratification trap
Thanks to our modern tech, companies have become wizards at delivering instant gratification. You have any form of entertainment that you want at your fingertips at the very moment you want it. Got an urge to watch a movie? Streaming services are happy to indulge you. Want to see what your friend is up to right this second? Facebook can tell you within seconds.
The internet has opened up a vast bazaar of quick-fix pleasures on the palm of your hand. Street vendors cry their wares. Merchants clamor for your attention. If you carry a smartphone, this bazaar can grab your attention whenever it chooses. Companies haul in billions of dollars by indulging our momentary whims the second we feel them.
You may even take this buzzing marketplace to bed with you at night.
Learning a craft like songwriting means taking a breath and stepping outside all of that.
Even a short session of daily practice can become a soothing escape from these overstimulated times.
Practice is not an instant gratification; instead it’s a gradual learning process. Practice is focused. Deliberate. Patient. Practice asks you to hold your attention on a single task for a little while, and in exchange it gives you permanent, lasting rewards.
So even though practice requires effort, the payoffs far outweigh the cost. And unlike those momentary entertainments we all indulge in, practice leaves you a little bit better at something each time you do it.
“I don’t have time to practice.”
I’ve heard this from students often: “I don’t have time to practice.”
Yes you do. If you have even a few free minutes per day, you have time to practice. Even short amounts of time add up if you spend those minutes wisely. Lack of time isn’t the problem; more likely it’s the distractions of daily life — and sometimes procrastination. To get the most out of life we need to make conscious, difficult decisions about what’s important to us, and spend our time accordingly.
When students tell me they didn’t have time to practice the previous week, I ask: “Did you have time to watch TV?”
Let’s say a person watches just one hour of television per day. Seems totally harmless, doesn’t it? Just an hour out of each day.
But in one year’s time, that single hour per day adds up to 365 total hours.
365 total hours… how much time is that, really?
Well, if you were to wake up every morning and just watch the tube from eight in the morning all the way through until midnight with no breaks whatsoever, and you did that every day, it would still take you twenty-two full days of nonstop watching before you reached 365 hours of television. So one hour of television per day adds up to a total of three weeks and one day taken out of your year. That’s nearly a month.
So watching just one hour of TV per day really means sacrificing three full weeks of your life every year. That’s the hidden cost.
Two hours of daily television adds up to a month and a half gone from every year of your life.
Four hours of daily television adds up to three months gone from every year. Three whole months! That’s one quarter of a person’s life lost and gone forever every year.
As the old saying goes, a small leak can sink a big ship.
I’m not telling you all this to lecture or moralize. I’m simply pointing out that seemingly small investments of time add up very quickly.
On the other hand…
If small bad habits add up fast, that’s also true for the good habits, right? If you show up to practice every day, the small amounts of time you invest into composing music, learning an instrument, or writing lyrics will soon pile up into real benefits.
It feels amazingly good to invest time daily into something that actually gives back to you. Something that actually builds you up.
That’s what this course is all about.
The Art of Daily Practice will guide you through the process of creating a separate time and space for your craft, away from all the distractions and temptations of daily life. It’s about making the most effective use of your limited practice time and your limited energy. And it’s about forming a daily practice habit that really sticks.
Practice, as we’ll explore in this course, can take anyone from clueless beginner to songwriting master over time. Or if your goals are more modest than “World-Class Mastery”, you can hop off the wagon anywhere you like and then simply work to maintain what skills you’ve gained.
There are also hidden benefits of practice: it trains your attention and tunes your perception. You may be surprised to find these benefits can ripple outward to impact other areas of your life.