Quotes from Jonathan Harnum

No matter what gifts you have, practice is the only way to get better at anything. "If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery it would not seem so wonderful at all" - Michael Angelo

If you want to get better, you simply have to practice. There's no way around it. Even though Prasad, Sona, and Rex all had beneficial early experiences with music, each has had to spend thousands of hours in practice to acquire their musical prowess. Rex told me, "If people could've lived my life and all the hours I've spent practicing the tuba alone in some little room someplace, they probably wouldn't label me as being particularly talented."[6]

Practice and playing music has to be like a religious experience. It has to be your religion, you know; it has to be your trance. You get something from a devotion to it and digging deeper into yourself and the nature of reality.

Those who can, do; those who do and understand, teach.

Forget about the 10,000-hour rule you've heard so much about. It's a red herring. What's important is not the hours you've practiced, but the kind of practice in your hours. Focus on the tree, not the forest.

The crossroads is a practice room. The devil to be dealt with is practice. Wynton Marsalis calls it "tackling the monster.

We're all gonna die trying to get it right, so aim high, and aim true. —Vance Joy

A single conversation with a wise person is worth a month's study of books.

with all your heart and all your brains.

The human mind is a messy place with few clear distinctions. You probably have a complex mix of both fixed and growth mindsets. I do. Untangling your mindsets can be a challenge. The good news is that you can change the fixed mindsets that you might discover lurking in your own theories about the nature of musical talent.

To see talent as a gift of natural ability instead of perceiving the long hours of practice that creates talent is nothing new. Michelangelo said, "If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.

We must not allow other people's limited perceptions to define us. Virginia Satir, psychotherapist (1916-1988)

Here are just a few activities highly accomplished professional musicians consider to be practice, not in any particular order: Listening Performing Watching others perform Playing informally Improvising Teaching Composing Group rehearsal

So what do you think? Is musical talent something you're born with? Is talent something you either have or you don't? Is musical ability genetic, a gift that runs in your blood? Or is musical talent a result of practice? Does talent develop from mere exposure to music? Can you become more talented through effort? Your answers to these questions matter in a big way. The biggest way.

You want to be relaxed when you play, and practicing while worried or anxious won't help you achieve that relaxation.

Those with a fixed mindset tend to learn things in a superficial way, just enough to prove they can do it. That's bad enough, but it gets worse. When people

Two kinds of practice contribute to the illusion of natural talent. I call them "accidental practice" and "play as practice.

There's a real art to not learning how to play an instrument and being able to still play it.

On the other hand, those with a growth mindset believe that intelligence is something that can be grown. Effort, work, and challenges are what make intelligence grow and flower and bear juicy fruit. People with a growth mindset aren't as attached to demonstrating their intelligence because they know intelligence can be increased, and so intelligence isn't a fundamental, unvarying aspect of their sense of self. Notice I said, "aren't as attached.

There is some pretty solid scientific evidence that babies in the womb can learn songs and sounds, one of the most important sounds being mommy's voice.

When great musicians practice, they go slowly enough that errors are avoided. When an error does crop up, expert practicers fix those errors immediately. That's the strategy: fixing a mistake immediately. Anybody can do it, and anybody who adopts that strategy will get better faster than those who don't.

There is nothing more serious than having fun.

Musical ability doesn't come from either the chicken or the embryo, it's the chicken and the embryo. Talent isn't some mysterious natural ability. Talent is practice in disguise.

Strong and sustained parental encouragement to practice was evident in virtually all successful young musicians.2 Encouragement is very different from enforcement, of course.