New month, so here’s a 31-day challenge to match. (See also: the 28-day, 30-day, and 100-day challenges.)
Here’s a fun video that Alistair Humphreys made about his 30-day challenge:
Happy practicing!
31-day Practice and Suck Less challenge
A clean four weeks
It occurred to me this morning, looking at the calendar, that February is a clean four weeks, starting on a Monday. (1/2/21.) Feels like a good time to start a 28-day “Practice and Suck Less” challenge, so I made a new printable poster:
It is a firm belief of mine that February is a better month for resolutions than January. (Especially now that all Januarys are approximately 331 days long.) You could start a reading habit, a journaling habit, or just practice turning off your stupid phone for an hour before you go to bed and an hour after you wake up. (Me, I’m going to keep practicing Debussy’s “Deux Arabesques,” and work on a book proposal.)
100-day Practice and Suck Less Challenge
After posting my 30-day Practice and Suck Less Challenge, I came across violinist Hilary Hahn’s 100 Days of Practice project: She posts a video of her practicing for 100 days on her Instagram with the hashtag #100daysofpractice and invites others to join her. (Similar to the 100-Day Project, which is coming up Jan. 31.)
View this post on Instagram
So, if you’re feeling ambitious and want to do a 100-day challenge, I made a new free, printable poster for you:
This challenge is not just for musicians, by the way: I first discovered it on Teju Cole’s Instagram stories. He wrote:
Hilary Hahn’s back-to-basics attitude to practice resonates with what I’ve tried to do with my writing in the past year.
I’ve gone back to fundamentals. I ask myself about openings, adverbs, commas, vocabulary, line lengths, sentence fragments, rhythm, voice.
I take one element at a time and examine it until I know better what I’m doing with it. Like analyzing a golf stroke or baseline jumper.
Always beginning
Beginner’s mind.
Begin again.
A Yellow Curtain Concert to mark #Beethoven’s 250th birthday. The Adagio cantabile from his “Pathétique” Sonata. Thank you Ludwig for all the hours spent with you. Totally worth it and opened me up as a person. We need a lot of strength at the moment and you help us with that. pic.twitter.com/rV9DXDpSHX
— Angela Hewitt (@HewittJSB) December 16, 2020
There’s something so heartening about watching masters of craft practice. Above is a video of pianist Angela Hewitt, who lost her “best friend” when movers dropped and smashed her beloved piano:
While she waited, she had to endure cancelled concerts because of the UK coronavirus lockdown, her principal residence being in London. Hewitt said she managed to stay sane by posting daily Twitter videos of herself playing easy pieces on her practice piano in her flat, and said the phone videos – some of which were viewed more than 140,000 times – provided a new way of connecting to a mass audience.
My resolution is to practice more ?
(“Auld Lang Syne” w/ Schumann intro) pic.twitter.com/N21NZys8uT
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) January 1, 2021
Always, always — remain a student!
30-day “Practice and Suck Less” challenge
“Lower your standards for what counts as progress,” writes Adam Grant, “and you will be less paralyzed by perfectionism.”
To get good, you first have to be willing to be bad. Don’t practice to get good, practice to suck less.
To celebrate the New Year, I made a new 30-day challenge, free for y’all to download and print:
Someone once asked me to distill all of my books into one piece of advice, and, off the top of my head, I said: “Try sitting down in the same place at the same time for the same amount of time every day and see what happens.” (This challenge is modified from The Steal Like An Artist Journal.)
Something small, every day, adds up to something big over time.
What should you practice? Whatever you want to suck less at. You can practice drawing, you can practice kindness, you can practice praying.
Me? I’m gonna practice the piano:
My resolution is to practice more ?
(“Auld Lang Syne” w/ Schumann intro) pic.twitter.com/N21NZys8uT
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) January 1, 2021
Happy New Year! Please feel free to share this challenge with anyone you think could use it.
If you liked this challenge, you’ll love my books.
Practice, suck less
My “practice/suck less” diagram drawn on @devthomas’s chalkboard-painted podium in his 7th grade classroom. I was delighted to hear from several teachers who said they were now discussing it with their students. “This is now my teaching philsophy statement,” tweeted @toddpetersen, “in full.”
I’ve been thinking about how practice is its own skill — that once you learn to practice, you can transfer that skill to almost anything else.
A few years ago, I tweeted, “Lots of people decide to train for a marathon and just go out and do it. Why not chose to have better handwriting? Or play the piano?” And @aribraverman tweeted back, “Actually, training for a marathon, going out every day… has helped me be better/braver at being new at things…. Started to learn French, learned to ride a motorcycle. Running helped me not stress/expect to be perfect right away.”
There are other lessons that practice teaches. Here is Liz Danzico on learning to play music:
Learning to play music is an long exercise learning to to be kind to yourself. As your fingers stumble to keep up with your eyes and ears, your brain will say unkind things to the rest of you. And when this tangle of body and mind finally makes sense of a measure or a melody, there is peace. Or, more accurately, harmony. And like the parents who so energetically both fill a house with music and seek its quietude, both are needed to make things work. As with music, it takes a lifetime of practice to be kind to yourself. Make space for that practice, and the harmony will emerge.
Here is my not-so-classroom-friendly image of practice. (The piece is Schumann’s “Träumerei.”)
A willingness to be bad
“It isn’t so much that geniuses make it look easy; it’s that they make it look it fast.”
—Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments
This week I re-read a 2010 piece by David Wong, author of John Dies at the End, called “How The Karate Kid Ruined The Modern World.” Wong laments how movies with training montages give us a skewed vision of how hard it actually is to get good at things:
Every adult I know — or at least the ones who are depressed — continually suffers from something like sticker shock (that is, when you go shopping for something for the first time and are shocked to find it costs way, way more than you thought). Only it’s with effort. It’s Effort Shock.
We have a vague idea in our head of the “price” of certain accomplishments, how difficult it should be to get a degree, or succeed at a job, or stay in shape, or raise a kid, or build a house. And that vague idea is almost always catastrophically wrong.
Accomplishing worthwhile things isn’t just a little harder than people think; it’s 10 or 20 times harder.
My 5-year-old son started piano lessons and I think it’s the first time he’s had to actually practice anything and he hates practicing already, and I’m not sure what the hell to tell him. If I say, “Well, don’t you want to be as good as Kraftwerk?” he’ll look at me like I’m a complete moron and motion to his Garageband tracks, like, “I am as good as Kraftwerk.”
Kids his age love to go around thinking that they’re the best in the world at things, and really, who wants to tell them otherwise? You don’t want to discourage them from doing things they love. But the switch towards taking on a practice and discipline is admitting to yourself that you suck and you want to get better.
I was chatting with my friend Adam and he mentioned he was taking drum lessons again after 20 years. He said he’d forgotten the joy of the practice –> suck a little less –> practice –> suck a little less loop.
Years ago I read an interview with actor Jason Segel and he talked about his willingness to be bad for as long as it takes:
I’m willing to be bad for as long as it takes, until I’m good….I don’t have a sense of shame. I just don’t. If I’ve hurt someone’s feelings, if I’m mean to somebody, I’ll lament over that for days. I’m that dude. I’ll lose sleep over mundane stuff. But I don’t really have the thing of, “Oh, I’ve embarrassed myself.” I just don’t understand why I would stop trying to play piano even though I’m not good at it. I want to be good at it. So why wouldn’t I keep playing?
How do you cultivate that willingness to be bad?
Related reading: “Practice, suck less”