Motivation is the grease and the ball bearings in the wheels of our music practice. Without motivation, absolutely nothing would happen. It’s as essential as the breath you breathe. Thing is, motivation is a slippery notion that tends to slip away when you try to wrap your mind around exactly what it is, where it comes from, and how it works. There are the usual things like listening to great music, going to see musicians live and talking to them if possible, but this is surface stuff. Motivation goes much deeper. There are two important aspects of motivation I’d like to throw out for you to chew on: goals (specifically what researchers call goal orientation), and your implicit theories on both intelligence and “talent.”
Category: Motivation
Motivation is the foundation for all practice, perhaps for all action. How can you increase it and sustain it? Learn what motivation research has to say about this important issue.
Your Plastic Brain (redux)
Learning changes your brain structure. My neurons underwent some serious alteration this weekend, all naturally induced, thank you very much. One of the world’s foremost grand masters of the djembe, Mamady Keita (vid to follow), was in Chicago to give beginning-, intermediate-, and advanced drum workshops. I’ve never had a djembe lesson before. I signed up for the beginner session and would learn very quickly what “beginner” actually meant to this crowd. Good thing I didn’t know that Keita’s definition of “beginner” is most people’s definition of, “I know what I’m doing.” If I’d known this, my stomach would’ve been in even more of a knot about showing up with little to no real djembe experience. Nothing like a good challenge to get you to really pay attention.
Live Music is Best: U2’s 360 Show in Chicago
Usually, our experience of music is very abstract. It’s coherent sound coming out of a speaker, with no visuals of those who made the music, and not only that but the actual event of making the music is in the past, sometimes the distant past. This is why live music of any kind is such a powerful and necessary thing for your own music. To see live bodies in a room (or stadium) with you, making music, breathes life into what it means to make music. The art becomes real, palpably so, and takes on a resonance and meaning that goes well beyond a recording…
Question Limitations
Stop thinking in terms of limitations and start thinking in terms of possibilities. – Terry Josephson …… The marvelous richness of human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome. The hilltop hour would not be half so wonderful if there were no dark valleys to traverse. -Helen Keller…
Book Review: Outliers: The Story of Success
No, it [excellence] doesn’t start with talent, it starts with love. —Malcolm Gladwell on Jimmy Kimmel Live (1-13-09) Luck is what you have left over after you give 100 percent. —Langston Coleman The zeitgeist in the world of practice is the 10,000 hour rule, a fact that first appeared in Ericsson’s research into excellence….
Don’t Eat the Marshmallow (yet)!
In another short and funny six minute TED talk called Don’t Eat the Marshnmallow Yet by Joachim de Posada, the advantages of delayed gratification are tested with four year old kids and marshmallows. If the kid could wait 15 minutes without eating a marshmallow in front of them, they got another one. The original Stanford…
Creative Practice
Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual. Arthur Koestler Some thinkers about creativity identify two different types: Creativity and creativity, or “Big C” and “Little c.” Some believe that “true” creativity is only that which contributes to changes in the way we think or…
Thoreau Was Right
What do you think they found?
Turns out that the students who read the directions written with the simple font were much more open to exercising and thought the regime would take less time and be more fluid and easy and were willing to make exercise a regular part of the day.
Success is Failure, Failure can be Success
The obstacle is the path.
The Practice of Practice 