I think that many guitarists are frustrated by their progress. They think about how many years they’ve been playing. And then they think about how they should be much better than they are. And this causes them to feel bad. It’s an easy trap to fall into. But here’s a question for you…
Have you ever considered that focusing on the length of time that you’ve played guitar for is setting yourself up to fail?
That’s a pretty interesting question. Here are my thoughts on it…
I believe that focusing on how long you’ve played is totally not a good idea. I feel that it’s much better to pay attention to how many focused hours of practice that you’ve done. What this means is rather than keeping track of how many weeks, months and years you have played for, you keep track of how many focused hours of practice that you do.
And what is a focused hour of practice? I think of it as an hour of practice that…
- Is developing skills relevant to your musical goals.
- Is done with effective practice techniques.
- Is done with a relaxed technique free from excessive muscle tension.
- Is done with a relaxed mental state free from anxiety, frustration and distraction.
The focused hour of practice is a much better unit of measurement for a few reasons…
Improved Accuracy
There is absolutely no correlation between the length of time someone has played and their ability. But there is an extremely positive correlation between focused hours of practice and ability.
Control
You have absolutely no control over the passage of time. But you do have total control over how many focused hours of practice that you do. If you’re not progressing at the rate you’d like, then the solution is simple. Do more focused hours of practice on a more regular basis.
Motivation
I find keeping track of how many focused hours of practice I do very motivating. I can look in my diary and feel a sense of accomplishment. I can see the work that I’m putting in and know that progress is certain.
Time Travel
It allows you to time travel. What do I mean by this? Let’s take a look at an example…
Example:
Let’s say that you meet a person who has played for 20 years. For this example, let’s say that the person has done 3 focused hours of practice each week for the last 20 years. (That works out to a total of 3,120 focused hours of practice).
Now let’s imagine that you admire their playing and would like to get to roughly the same level. What would you need to do? Yep, you got it. You would need to do 3,120 to get roughly to the same level of playing.
Because you’re motivated and passionate about guitar you decide to practice guitar for 2 hours a day. This would mean that doing the 3,120 focused hours of practice would take 1,560 days. This works out to 4.27 years.
So you have effectively made 20 years progress in only 4.27 years!
Pretty cool huh? This thought alone should be pretty inspiring. You can easily accelerate your progress (i.e. time travel) by working harder.
That’s all for now. But before we finish up, I need to ask you one last question…
How many focused hours of practice did you do this week?
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