Tomorrow is February. Again.
For a few years now, I’ve been pushing February as a month of possibility.
It’s the shortest month, so it should be the easiest for a daily “practice and suck less” challenge.
This year is a leap year and we get an extra day in February, so here’s a 29-day challenge for you to download and print out.
Good luck!
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!
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.)
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!
“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.
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