M2M Day 242: It only took me 16 hours to develop perfect pitch
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For June, my goal is to develop perfect pitch.
It’s the last day of June, which means it’s time to look back and see just how much time I spent on this month’s challenge.
After going through my practice logs and tallying everything up, here’s what I found: In total, I spent only 16 hours on this month’s challenge, or a little bit more than 35 minutes per day.
Interestingly, although I spent noticeably less time on this challenge versus most of the previous challenges, from a mental exertion standpoint, this challenge likely stands near the top of the leaderboard.
In other words, this challenge demanded less time, but way more intensity on a minute-by-minute basis.
In order to get anything out of my training sessions, I had to consistently max out my brain’s CPU. There was no way to take this challenge at a more leisurely pace.
This is actually an interesting insight…
For the past eight months, at the end of every challenge, I have summarized the month by totaling up the number of hours I practiced. I do this both because I’m curious how much time I spent training and because I think it helps others understand/appreciate what went into each challenge.
But, the time dimension is only half the picture. What I haven’t included in these posts is how I use this time.
There’s a big difference between leisurely practicing something for an hour and maintaining intense concentration for an hour, but this distinction is lost when I just report the total number of hours.
So, this month’s challenge is a good reminder to say: “It’s usually less about the number of hours that you put in, and more about what you make of those hours”.
Nevertheless, it’s much more difficult to measure effort, so we’ll still have to settle on hours as the most measurable and universally understood proxy.
And so, with hours as the measurement of interest, I must say… For a 16-hour investment, I’m quite happy with the progress I made.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
