When I was a kid, I was just in awe of professional musicians. How do you get up on stage and play song after song and not mess up?

Well, I’m still in awe of professional musicians, but now I understand something fundamental: Most of the time, whatever they’re doing up there is as easy as driving around town or carrying on a conversation.

It takes a degree of effort and concentration, but it’s within the range of routine activities. They’re not pushing themselves so hard that they’re risking a train wreck in front of hundreds or thousands of people. They’re doing something that they can already reliably do.

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“If you’re in such a hurry, why don’t you ride your bike instead of walking it?”

“I don’t have time to stop and get on!”

I don’t remember where I heard or saw this joke, but it has stuck with me for decades. And I think of it often as a teacher and coach. What is it that causes so many of us to do things the hard way, pushing through without the necessary information or resources?

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These days, I’m learning how to manage projects.

This is not a well-developed skill for me. I’m good at managing a process — something repeatable that can be refined over time — and I’ve had a lot of experience dealing well with novel situations and improvising on the fly. My weakness is one-time, short-term endeavors with a beginning, middle, and end. Projects. Yeah, those.

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If you look up a common question on the Internet (“How to lose ten pounds,” “How to save money,” “How to quit smoking,”), you are likely to find many results.

The thing is, all of these results are the same. Page after page of the same tips, the same benign encouragement.

Finding something deeper is can be hard. You might not even know that it’s out there, but it must be. I know this because the “top ten tips” articles in my own areas of expertise are all but useless, and sometimes downright misleading or wrong.

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Aspiring (or failed) guitarists often tell me of their troubles with strumming.

“I never could get the hang of it,” they’ll say, no matter how long they’ve been trying.

They think the problem is strumming. And they’ve probably sought help from a guitar teacher with the intent of resolving this strumming problem. However, I know the reason it didn’t work. It’s because their problem is actually their chord changes.

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In audio production, it all starts with the microphone.

The quality of the mic dictates the quality of the sound. It’s got to be set up properly — the correct angle and distance from the sound source. Then, the first volume knob, wherever it is, must be turned up as high as possible without risk of distortion.

That way, the recording is beginning with the strongest and best sound possible as it enters the signal chain. All other volume knobs can be turned down relative to the signal coming from the mic or mic preamp.

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