How much practice does it take to get really, really good at something? In his book, Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell argues that the magic number is 10,000 hour of practice. While I haven’t read this book, the idea that it takes a certain number of hours of practice to make one truly an expert is a common enough one. It makes sense, too. If it were easy it wouldn’t be nearly so worth while. Those who excel absolutely must put in a lot of time and effort into practice.
On the one hand, this idea seems to be an advocate for hard work. There are no shortcuts, you simply have to practice a lot. That said, this is also a simple idea and these can be deceptively attractive. While the discipline to put in all those hours of practice certainly is demanding for most people, the concept is so easy that it can actually turn into a crutch. Not improving as fast as you want? Just keep plugging away and in another 5 or 10 years it will be there. We end up mistaking the duration of our practice for quality practice.
David Healey addressed this in his essay The Fallacy of the 10,000-Hour Rule. Healey makes two very important points in it. First, there are definitely people who have put in the time but not achieved the success.
There are many jazz musicians, for instance, who have put in the hours of practice yet are not even known amongst the cognoscenti of the genre. The same goes for all the aspiring computer programmers that never became as rich as Bill Gates and are now stuck in a cubicle somewhere (Gladwell does admit that Gates’ wealth did largely come from pure luck). Gladwell does not even entertain the prospect that there are those who did the work yet never got anywhere, and also assumes that all concert pianists have technical fluency (but are they emotionally expressive? For that matter, isn’t technical fluency based on gradations of fluency rather than a yes/no situation?).
Something that Healey doesn’t mention is that some of those lesser known individuals are indeed quite good at what they do, but for whatever reasons haven’t been in the right place at the right time to be noticed and achieve a level of commercial success relative to their musical abilities. I’m sure everyone can think of examples of popular musicians who don’t really deserve their success and very musical artists who are virtually unknown. Commercial and musical successes are two different things.
Healey’s second point is even more important, I feel. It’s not how long you practice that makes one better, but how well one practices.
Some ways of practicing are better and more efficient than others (check out those Hal Galper videos for more info) and a lot of the time I feel that valuable practice time is wasted of stupid, pointless exercises that have no effect on your jazz playing whatsoever. 10,000 hours of these and notice that your playing will get better, but nowhere near as much as doing 5,000 hours of a balanced routine full of useful practice tasks which involve you transcribing the shit out of things, assiduously gaining the information you like, applying this newly-learnt information out at a jam session (which is as much practice as anything else, and is fun to boot), thinking about music in a conceptual way and gaining the life experience necessary to be able to put some soul into your playing.
I’ve been fortunate in that many of my teachers not only taught me how to play music, but also emphasized how to practice better. Like playing any instrument, becoming better at how you practice is an ongoing process that needs to continually evolve. At no point do I think I’m going to feel I need to quit learning how to practice better.
I’ve been experimenting with some different practice approaches lately and coming across David Healey’s essay has given me some inspiration to examine my practice in more detail. One thing I’ll occasionally do is keep a practice journal which I’ll record goals, what I practiced and for how long, and how things go. Over a couple of weeks or so a picture can emerge that I use to alter my practice in small ways to see how changing around how I practice something will change the overall results.
While doing this sometimes actually reduces some of my actual “metal on the mouth” time (taking notes rather than actually practicing) I find that the act of keeping a practice journal usually helps my playing get better anyway. It becomes so much more obvious when I never seem to get around really working on a particular piece or element of my technique, I notice where my attention starts to falter more easily and my overall focus during my practice session improves.
So for an overall practice goal for the rest of this summer I’d like to challenge everyone not to practice more, but better. Set your goals, focus your attention appropriately, and don’t just strive to become better at music, but also better at practicing.
