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 stimulating, but also stressful — it’s easy to get caught up in the rush and lose track of the things that are most important to us as songwriters, musicians, and creatives.
Mastery at any creative craft — at any skill, really — has always depended on self-mastery. It takes time and patience and careful effort.
Today, though, information overload is the norm, and many people live with constant bombardment from smartphones, computers, and advertising. So we rush through things. We take shortcuts. Instead of reading, we learn to skim. Instead of patiently working to overcome a problem, we give up.
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.
“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.
It’s all too easy to put something off until “tomorrow.” Renegotiating the promise you made to yourself is easier than actually delivering on that promise. But tomorrow’s going to be busy, too. 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
Companies have gotten better and better at delivering any form of entertainment that you want to your fingertips at the very moment you want it. Got an urge to watch a movie? Streaming services are happy to offer you thousands of choices and satisfy that craving the instant you feel it. 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 in your living room. Street vendors cry their wares. Merchants clamor for your attention. And now that the internet is deeply embedded in most cell phones, this bazaar can yell for your attention anytime, anywhere. Companies pull in billions of dollars by indulging our momentary whims anywhere, anytime.
You may even take this buzzing marketplace to bed with you at night.
Learning a craft like songwriting means taking a step outside all of that.
Even brief daily practice can be a deeply satisfying and calming escape from all the overstimulation and the noise and information overload of our daily lives.
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, and it gives you permanent rewards for your temporary efforts.
So even though practice requires effort, the satisfaction far outweighs 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 small 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. We need to make conscious, difficult decisions about what’s important to us, and what we do and do not have time for in our lives.
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 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 moralize. I’m simply pointing out that seemingly small investments of time can actually add up very quickly.
On the other hand…
If small daily 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 amazing 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 Master”, you can get off the bus anywhere you like and then simply work to maintain what skill you’ve gained.
There are also hidden benefits of practice: it trains your attention and tunes your perception in ways that can ripple outward to impact the rest of your life in surprising and enriching ways.