I'm Committed!

I came across a lovely quote this morning:

There is a difference between interest and commitment. When you're interested in something, you do it only when it's convenient. When you're committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.

Ken Blanchard

It was a bit of an eye-opener, really, as it helped me to realize that up until now, I've mostly been interested in the things that mattered to me, not committed.

True, I have at times shown real committment. I am, and have always been, truly committed to doing right by my kids. And it required committment, not mere interest, to finish those last few assignments and get my degree. In fact, it required a change from interest to committment that I'll never forget: I was four assignments short of completing my degree, and all were overdue, and I had exactly one week to finish them all and submit them.

And I was just about to give up when I sat myself down for a talk, and told myself, "I can do this, and here's the plan."

And I did it.

So now, years later, I'm facing the fact that I have two areas of my life that mean a lot to me, but have, until this month, garnered mere interest, and not committment.

If you're a regular reader, you can probably predict what those two areas are. Yes, I'm talking about writing and music.

At the beginning of November, I made a promise to myself that no matter what happened in a given day, no matter how busy I was, I'd find the time to add at least 100 words to my novel. I've kept that promise so far, and it hasn't been easy. Thursday and Friday were horrendous as far as scheduling was concerned. Thursday in particular I was so exhausted by suppertime that I feared I'd once again drop the ball.

But I did it. I pushed myself and I did it.

Last night, we had our first concert of the season. I had no idea how I'd make it through the night--we played Beethoven's Seventh, and playing a Beethoven symphony is like lying down in front of a herd of charging wildebeast and hoping for the best. It's exhausting, at the very least.

But I made it through, of course. Once I sat down on my chair on the stage, there was no other choice. And I realized that we all have a choice when we're faced with really hard things, like swimming lenghts in a pool or playing a symphony or writing a novel or sometimes even getting out of bed. We can give up when we start to encounter resistance, or we can push ourselves on and see it through to the bitter end.

The first option shows we were only interested, the second shows committment.

The other eye-opener last night was an announcement by a member of the BOD of the orchestra that they were trying to find a way to pay all of the players an honourarium. Wha??? They want me to become a paid musician?

And I realized that the jump from dabbling amateur to paid musician required a step on my part: from interest to committment.

And I realize that I'm ready to take that step.

In rethinking my life these past weeks, I have realized that my main regrets from the past were due to not taking my loves seriously enough. I chose to take a science degree rather than a music degree as a teenager because music wasn't something one could make money at. No one told me that as a violist, I'd be in such demand that I could find employment without having to be the best player in the orchestra!

And I've wasted over twenty years of my writing career, just by being interested rather than committed.

Well, the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

So I'll go for second best, knowing that in twenty years, I won't regret my decision to commit myself.

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish...

I have an audition Sunday for orchestra. The Board of Directors, along with the Music Director, decided in the spring that all players must audition, I think as more of a placement and coaching thing than as a "you have to pass or you're out" kind of thing.

But you see, I don't know for certain, and as the least accomplished member of the orchestra (and I can say this with no pride and no exaggeration), if it so happens that it's a pass/fail, situation, I will almost certainly fail.

So I had to decide over the summer how I would handle it if that was the case. I'm a charter player in the orchestra. I haven't played every year, and I miss too many practices, but I'm one of the reasons the orchestra actually exists at all--it was founded by a friend of mine so that people like me would have a place to play. But I have to admit that the orchestra has improved (a lot!), and I haven't. Because I haven't been practicing, just playing.

And I decided that if I didn't "pass," instead of complaining, I'd ask to just play at practices, and not concerts, and re-audition after the first concert. In the meantime, I plan to practice my fingers off.

Which is where the fish come in.

My daughter is in the midst of training as a Suzuki teacher. One thing that HER first teacher did was have "fish" charts, where the fish had a hundred scales that could be coloured in, one for each scale or practice passage played. Ally made up a blank scale chart with 103 scales, and I photocopied it a bunch of times, and now I'm doing scales and practicing one particular passage in a Seitz concerto 103 times. I've been able to play that concerto movement all the way through for years, but never well. So my goal it to master that to performance level, so I've broken it down into passages to practice.

As well, I am (of course) practicing the passages of Beethoven's 7th that have been designated for the audition.

And an amazing thing has happened--after only an hour or two of concentrated work, I'm already sounding better.

20 scales down, 83 to go...

Numbers that Shock: 10,000

The book jacket blurb for Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers begins:

There is a story that is usually told about extremely successful people, a story that focuses on intelligence and ambition. In Outliers Malcolm Gladwell argues that the true story of success is very different, and that if we want to understand how some people thrive, we should spend more time looking around them — at such things as their family, their birthplace, or even their birth date. The story of success is more complex — and a lot more interesting — than it initially appears.

Except that it isn't complex at all, though I did find it fascinating. It turns out that birthdate and birthplace, family culture, and yes, even intelligence and ambition, have only one function in success: to allow the would-be successful person to reach that magic number.

10,000.

Gladwell cites a study done in the early 1990's with a group of music students at the elite Academy of Music in Berlin. The school's violinists were divided into groups according to how well they played. The truly elite students had the potential to become world-class soloists. The second group was merely good — Gladwell doesn't say so, but knowing music as I do, these players would go on to become orchestral players and private teachers, much as my daughter aims to do. The third group were students who would likely not have a professional music career, but who would end up teaching in the public school system.

The students were all asked the same question: Over the course of your entire career, how many hours have you practiced?

Most of these students started playing at around five years of age. At that age, they might have practiced fifteen to thirty minutes a day, or two to three hours a week. But by age eight (the same age my daughter decided she was going to be a professional music teacher), differences started to emerge. Some students were practicing more than six hours a week by age nine, eight by age twelve, and by age fourteen, two or more hours a day. By the age of twenty, these top students were practicing, which Gladwell defines as "purposefully and single-mindedly playing their instruments with the intent to get better" for over thirty hours a week. By the age of twenty, these top performers had reached that magic number: 10,000. Ten thousand hours of purposeful practice.

In contrast, the future teachers had totalled a mere four thousand hours, and the good students about eight thousand hours.

The same result was obtained with pianists, and when Gladwell scratched the surface of successful people as diverse as famous musicians, computer geniuses, hockey players, and chess grand masters, he found the same number cropping up. Ten thousand. That's how many hours of purposeful practice it takes to become truly masterful at something. Your age, your gender, the place and era into which you were born, your economic status, your intelligence and your natural passion for an endeavour — all of these things will help you, but only insofar as they gain you the opportunity to put in those ten thousand hours of practice.

The study of music students showed something else that is of enormous interest to me. In the entire study, there were no students who were "naturals" or "geniuses," gaining status and ability without putting in the prerequisite hours of practice.

More importantly, at least for me, there were no "grinds," students who worked harder and put in more hours of practice than their peers, without gaining ability.

10,000 hours is the only thing that's standing between me and my dreams, and I can't really blame any innate lack of ability for not being a better writer/artist/musician/researcher/scientist.

Gladwell says it takes a person about ten years to accomplish this feat. But starting from zero, and working purposefully for five hours a day, the actual time needed is five years, 175 days. (And I'm not starting from zero, at least in math...)

Ten years is a more realistic number, but even then, I realize that at age 51, I'll still only be 61 (and hopefully have lots of good years left in me) by the time I acheive mastery in whatever it is that I want to master. And to be honest, I'm partway there already in anything I'd care to try my hand at.

And a short note to the naysayers: No, I'm not so unrealistic as to think that I could, for example, become a world-class basketball player. My age, my gender, and my height are all against me. But if I wanted to, I could practice and become very good indeed.

Nor am I blind to the fact that the reason many people never acheive excellence is because they're too busy trying to live and survive. I think that one of the major aims of any just world order would be to give everyone that chance, though.

But I cannot any longer avoid the striking reality that if I so choose, I can become truly an expert at something, and that if I end my life being only moderately talented, it's my own damn choice.

I think one of the truly sad things about humanity is our addiction to the ideas of "fate" and "talent." Belief that it takes "talent" to succeed has kept many, many more people from succeeding than lack of opportunity ever did. Perhaps it's just because we've been fed this bs for so long, or perhaps it's human nature to wish to avoid taking responsibility for our lives, or maybe it's just easy to pretend that our lack of will to practice is due to lack of talent and not to the choice we've made not to practice.

Because it is a choice. Not an easy one, I grant you. In talking to my daughter, I realize that the choice she made not to be a top student was indeed conscious, and not due to lack of faith in her abilites as a cellist. She wants to spend time with friends and family, she wants to pursue other interests. So she's chosen NOT to be in the top group at her school

But it was a choice.

In my case, I too have a choice. My kids are grown. I have lots of interests and activities to fill my time, but I do have a burning desire to be really good at a few things, or maybe even only one thing.

My question to myself: What will it be, and am I willing to take the hours to purposefully practice that skill or skills?

Music to My Ears

Over at RevGalBlogPals, some questions were asked that if answered, will tell you folks a lot about me. So here are the questions and answers:

1) Do you like to sing/listen to others sing? In worship, or on your own (or not at all?)

Yes. Just yes.

2) Did you grow up with music in worship, or come to it later in life? Tell us about it, and how that has changed in your experience.

My parents didn't have the kind of professional training that my kids have, but they are musicians just the same. They've sung in the choir my whole life, and when we came home from church, our conversations would sound more like bad opera than normal conversation. We had a piano, organ, autoharp and recorder, and as technology improved, my dad would always buy the latest recording and playback equipment.

Not much has changed in fifty years. Due to time constraints, I'm not in the choir, but I take vocal and piano lessons from our Music Minister, and I sing at times. My kids sing or play during worship, too, when asked.

3) Some people find worship incomplete without music; others would just as soon not have it. Where do you fall?

I can actually appreciate both. I'd rather have no music than bad music, meaning music that espouses a theology that's diametrically opposed to what I preach and believe. What matters most to me is the spiritual energy in the sanctuary or worship space.

4) Do you prefer traditional music in worship, or contemporary? That can mean many different things!

Yes. Handel, Bach, Jim Strathdee, and so on... Contemporary or classical, doesn't really matter. I love singing the "old favourites" just as much as I love singing contemporary hymns. It's all music to my ears.

5) What's your go-to music ... when you need solace or want to express joy? A video/recording will garner bonus points!

Here's hoping the link turns out properly...

So that's my take on worship in music. I went to a seminary where the music prof stated that the prerequisite for a Master of Divinity should be a Bachelor's degree in music. One of my kids has grown up to be a professional musician, who will be graduating with that B.Mus. in the spring. The eldest is a very talented amateur, who is presently in his first year of M.Div. studies. We have more instruments in our homes and more up-to-date recording equipment than my dad does, and the collection keeps on growing.

The beat goes on, indeed!