M2M Day 227: I’ve gotten ahead of myself
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For June, my goal is to develop perfect pitch.
Three days ago, I surprised myself and scored an 85% on a 20-note perfect pitch test. This was exciting, but also detrimental to my progress.
Before taking this test, I was practicing my pitch identification abilities only on smaller groups of notes (not on all 12). So, while this one performance suggested that I was ready to ramp up my practice to full chromaticism (i.e. all 12 notes), I wasn’t actually ready.
As a result, for the past three days, I’ve made little progress, lost motivation, and built up a bit of frustration.
Here’s the problem: After my surprising performance on Monday, I abandoned my methodical practice schedule, and instead, just tried to replicate and improve upon my 85% score, jumping directly into 12-note practice sessions.
However, because I didn’t have a stable foundation for this, my performance during these sessions has been all over the place, and not particularly good.
I started comparing myself to this 85% baseline, which was a surprising outlier and not a fair assessment of my skills. Thus, everything else in comparison has seemed disappointing and a regression from where I was.
These feelings of “moving backwards” have been unmotivating to say the least, and so, I’ve found myself avoiding practice over the past couple days (as not to continue piling on to this disappoint feeling).
Today, I was able to recognize that I’ve gotten ahead of myself, and have prematurely set my “baseline” too high, resulting in this loss of motivation.
Tomorrow, I need to go back to the basics, work my way up from the bottom, and reassess where I’m truly at.
If I can remain disciplined, steady, and self-aware in my practice sessions, I should be just fine. In fact, even just acknowledging my falsely high standards (via writing this post) has reignited my motivation.
The lesson here is clear: To remain motivated, it’s important to believe in the end goal, but not try to rush there. It’s important to progress through steady, ability-specific practice, rather than “progress through storytelling” or “progress through self-delusion”.
Monday’s 85% doesn’t represent my baseline, but instead shows what’s possible. With this small tweak in mentality, I’m ready to get back to a more serious daily practice.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
