M2M Day 334: It only took me 11 hours
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For September, my goal is to continuously freestyle rap for three minutes.
It’s the last day of September, which means it’s time to look back and see just how much time I spent on this month’s challenge.
Over the month, I practiced in 41 discreet sessions spread over 26 days, with one or two sessions per day. Each session typically lasted between 10–15 minutes, totaling 549 minutes or about nine hours for the month.
On top of this, I spent about two additional hours performing (on the street, for friends, for the camera, etc.).
So, in total, I only spent eleven hours training this month, which is a bit surprising to me: I felt like I was consumed by freestyle rap the entire month.
Of course, these eleven hours don’t count all the little freestyle riffs that played out in my internal monologue while I went about my normal life. In fact, in the past week or so, my brain became conditioned to search for rhymes almost all of the time, so there was definitely some casual “practice” going on as well that wasn’t counted as part of the eleven hours.
Nevertheless, there seems to be two main reasons why this month didn’t require too much training time: 1. A large part of becoming a better freestyle rapper is simply committing to freestyle in a serious and unfiltered way, and 2. In a typical, fully-focused, 15-minute training session, I could work through about 200 rhymes, which is significant, especially since I found the English language to be highly contained in terms of word types and rhyme types. In other words, if you’re practicing in a fully focused manner, it doesn’t take very long to start noticing the clear, exploitable patterns of English.
I genuinely believe that anyone who makes a commitment to seriously attempting freestyle rap can make noticeable progress quickly. Given this, and the fact that freestyling is extremely fun, I’d highly recommend you give it a try…
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
