Lately I’ve noticed marked musical improvement with one of my students and with a musician friend of mine at church. It’s because they’ve been practicing consistently. I’ve known for years that consistent practice makes you good at things, I just love it every time I see it, and I find it worthy of remark. That and being a musician and a music teacher both require me to harp on the necessity and discipline of practice.
Practice is necessary. If I don’t practice, I won’t be good at music, and I can’t tell someone else to practice without being a hypocrite. If I don’t tell a student to practice, and if they just don’t practice, they won’t be good at music either. If you don’t practice, you won’t be good at the thing you want to get good at.
Practice is a discipline. You have to make time for it (because you won’t just accidentally find time), and you have to do it regularly and consistently, even (and sometimes especially) when you don’t feel like it.
They say practice makes perfect, but practice also makes permanent. If you practice something enough, you’ll start doing it automatically. This is good if you’ve practiced correctly, and bad if you’ve practiced incorrectly. So when you practice, make sure you’re practicing correctly, or you’ll have to unlearn what you practiced so you can relearn the correct way.
Did I mention practice is important because it makes you better at the thing you’re practicing? The more you do something, the more efficient you will become at it, but only if you do it regularly.
Related:
Practice
More Practice
Practicing What You Don’t Like
Practicing Your Scales
Practicing Discipline
Benefit and Consistent Work