The Most Important Thing

The most important thing to learn is how to enjoy practicing.

Find the joy in practice. Learn to enjoy the feeling of playing a scale to a metronome and placing that note just perfectly on the beat. Get to know and love the feel of arpeggios played slowly and methodically. Learn to find enjoyment in the practice and you’ll always be making improvement.

The process is beautiful, so savor it. Think about where you want to go so that you can point yourself in the right direction, but enjoy right where you are. The more you are enjoying the present moment in your practice, the more likely you are to return to it and the better your results will be. By focusing on today’s session you are pushing closer to your goals. Being distracted by feelings of inadequacy or concern about the future will cause you to be less effective today, thus delaying all of your goals and dreams about where you could be in a year, or five.

What was it about music that brought you here in the first place?

Surely it wasn’t a feeling of stress about needing to be the best or fastest. It was the joy that the music inspired. Listening to your favorite band, waiting for that guitar solo and smiling ear to ear. Remember that moment. Take the time to feel that when you pick up your guitar, and know that you don’t have to be the best. You never will be, because the best is subjective. You can be YOUR best.

You can do that by bringing joy to your daily practice and savoring the process, then coming back to it every day and building on that feeling. Let it be your therapy and you’ll keep coming back. By coming back again and again you’ll make better progress, and the cycle will continue on it’s own.