You’re practicing some Bach or your tennis serve or a purl stitch…and then you hit a wrong note, whiff the ball, or drop a stitch off of the needle.
At this moment, you have a choice! Do you:
a) Tell yourself, “It’s okay! You got this.” or
b) Tsk yourself?
Read MoreAs a freshman voice student, I was in trouble: I was supposed to sing opera, which I was terrible at.
My first teacher was an older man with a brisk, condescending demeanor. Our lessons together were bearable, but something was missing. By January or so, I didn’t feel that I had made a lot of improvement, and I’m sure he felt the same way.
One day, I asked him, “Do you believe that anyone can learn to sing?”
Read MoreThough there are certainly times when dogged determination can carry the day, it’s also true that discouragement leads to a lot of quitting, even though major motion pictures are not made to tell those stories.
Trying harder doesn’t always yield results.
Read MoreJason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp, doesn’t believe in goals. He claims he’s never had one.
Imagine being able to succeed by just wanting to make things — and make things better for everyone. Fried is proof that it is possible.
So often, we focus on an external timeline that we have to satisfy in order to be acceptable. We believe that if we fail to keep up with others (or with our own imagined future self), our efforts have no value — or even that we have no value.
Read MoreWhen we're learning something new, it can be discouraging to compare ourselves with more established artists.
It can almost make you want to put down the guitar, step away from the watercolors, or get off the stunt motorbike.
The first thing to do is close out Instagram or Facebook or wherever you're watching people make art instead of doing it yourself. Social media can be great for inspiration, but it's easy to overdose on consuming instead of creating.
This was a sentiment I had heard many times from adult students. Coming from a fifty-year-old with a demanding job and family obligations, it had a veneer of validity. I had often had a similar thought myself, as I compared my career to those of the people I aspired to be like.
However, hearing the same exact words from a small child caused me to question my beliefs. His words confirmed for me that the concern about running out of time and falling behind is driven by fear, not reality.
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