One natural risk of getting good at any sort of technique is that you may find yourself relying on that technique a little too much—using it like a crutch in certain situations. Or you may find that after a period of steady growth and progress, you begin to get stagnant.
Plateaus like this are totally normal. They form quite naturally at different stages of your growth as an artist. But the problem of course is that while you’re on a plateau, you’re not growing.
Fortunately it’s easy enough to get moving in a productive direction again. The key is to recognize that your progress has slowed or stopped. Then, instead of letting yourself sit on your laurels, you can push on, uphill, toward steeper territory and new challenges.
Automaticity: your friend and foe
Automaticity is the word psychologists use to describe what happens when you know a complex process so well that you can perform it without even paying attention to the individual steps involved anymore. You just begin the routine, and your mind just automatically carries out the task without much conscious thought from you. You experience this every time you tie your shoes or drive a car or read an analog clock. You may also experience it with songs that you’ve memorized.
For certain skills, automaticity is helpful. For example, early on when you’re learning to read sheet music, you might have to think very carefully and consciously about which pitch is represented by each of the staff lines. After a few weeks of practice, though, you can glance at a note and immediately just know which pitch you’re looking at. In this case, that automaticity is a good thing because there’s only one correct answer when you’re trying to read a pitch. Being able to identify the pitch instantly and correctly frees up your mind to focus on other things.
For other situations, automaticity leads to creative ruts. The troublesome kind of automaticity comes about in creative situations where there are many different approaches that could work, yet you find yourself relying too much on one or two tricks that you’ve grown comfortable with.
It’s very satisfying of course when you’re able to easily play something that you once found difficult—but once an approach becomes easy, you stop having to think. And when you stop having to think, you stop learning.
How to shake yourself out of a rut
- Instead of just relying on your usual bag of tricks to get you through, take initiative to train yourself constantly on new techniques, strategies, and approaches.
- Instead of just relying on what you’re excellent at, turn your gaze toward your weaknesses and toward things you don’t yet know.
Here’s one of the paradoxes of learning a craft: when you feel totally comfortable, and the work feels easy and feels effortless, you’re actually falling behind. When something becomes easy, and especially when something becomes automatic, it’s time to move on. The more time you spend struggling with new challenges, and the more time you spend feeling like a beginner, the stronger you actually become.
So… if you want to continue advancing, and you want to be a versatile artist, you need the humility to constantly enter areas of study where you’re a beginner. Embrace the discomfort, accept the risky feeling of trying new things.
The best way to get good at your craft is to tackle the things you’re bad at.
How to use the Four Categories of Change to escape a rut
Having the ability to generate lots of variations on a theme is not only useful for composing original works—it’s also good for disrupting any patterns you’ve found yourself stuck in.
You can take the oldest, moldiest passage of music—something you’ve played dozens of times, something that’s become totally brainless and easy—and make it challenging again by using one or more of the Four Categories of Change to alter it.
- Add
- Subtract
- Rearrange
- Replace
One extreme example is that you could rearrange the piece by playing it entirely backwards (Rearranging the notes). You could transpose a major key melody down to a minor key melody (Replacing the key signature). You could add notes (Falling under the “Add” Category of Change, of course) or you could subtract them. There are many, many possibilities here. Becoming stale is a choice; you never have to stay stale for long.