In which we’ll reclaim focus in this Age of Distraction.
Phone calls. Incoming texts. Family. Friends. Facebook. TV shows. 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.
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. Want to see what your friend is up to right this second? Facebook will tell you.
The internet has opened up an entire bazaar of instant gratifications in your living room. You carry this bazaar in your pocket everywhere you go, too, in the form of a smartphone. You may even have taken this marketplace into your bed.
Companies are pulling in billions of dollars by indulging our momentary whims anywhere, anytime.
Learning a craft like songwriting means taking a step outside all of that. Practice is an escape from all the overstimulation and the noise and the information overload of our daily lives. It’s 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.
“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.
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.
How much time is 365 hours, exactly? 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, 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.
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.
On the other hand…
Small daily habits add up fast, and that’s also true for the good habits. 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 add up fast. 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 can take anyone from clueless beginner to songwriting master over time—or anywhere in between. And not only that, but practice trains your attention and tunes your perception in ways that can ripple outward to have a positive impact on the rest of your life.
But only if you show up—and as we know, showing up isn’t always easy…