Power of Habits - For a Musician

I was reading the book ‘Atomic Habits’ by James clear for the last couple of weeks. As i was reading through the book, I realised how tiny changes in my music practice habits was able to bring remarkable changes in me as a musician.

Setting up a quick context about my musical journey will help me convey my experience better. I started to learn the Piano when I was 7 years old. The day i started learning from my teacher, my primary task was to just press all the keys on the keyboards and listen to how it sounds. Quite simple and easy? As i kid, i was fully enthusiastic to Jump in and press random keys and play with it. My teacher was just beside, just giving me quirky smile and let me play with the keyboard and make noise for a while. Then, he said “enough of playing with the keyboard, let’s start playing it”. I stared at him.? He told me to play the keys one by one, incrementally from the lowest one to the highest one. Taadaa!! We have a melody. Quite easy right? That was what i thought too.

I was quite excited for the next step where all the difficulty started. I had been given exercises to strengthen my fingers and it involved complex patterns contradicting the movements in the left and the right hand which i couldn’t play at all. It seemed like climbing a mount Everest after being trained to climb the stairs. Yes Rome was not built in one day.

As a kid i cant deny to do what my teacher and parents say. The Mantra that they said was “Practice-Practice-Practice” and I hated them for that. I ended up doing those exercises again and again and again but could not even complete one phrase by the end of one month. I lost interest completely and started hating the instrument. But still i was forced to practice for 30 mins every day no matter what. by the end of 2nd week post a month, suddenly the mapping between the neurons of my fingers and my brain found its way and the fluency was seamless. It seemed like an overnight victory for me. For the first time in the two months, I was all excited for my next piano class. I jumped in to play the exercise continuously even before my teacher came into the room to review. He came close to me with the same quirky smile and said ‘Good, you are playing the piece well. But understand it was the 30 mins that you spent every day before yesterday that got you here. Consistency is the key’.

I did not understand it by then as i was all happy that i got the piece right. But now when i turn back, I see how small and consistent habits have helped me be the musician i am today. Everything has a threshold. The one who is consistent, cracks it and gains a huge reward. The one who fails, ends up blaming the the process to be difficult and give it up. The graph says it all.

I have more such stories in my music career which demonstrates remarkable improvement in fixing tiny habits which I would love to share in more of my blogs

Monk