Go Back to the Basics Every Day

I like to think I’m better today than I was yesterday. That might be good in some ways, but it’s also a hinderance to further progress.

I’ve been a musician for most of my life. If we assume that my practice routine is flawless (it’s not), I should be making progress on a daily basis. But that doesn’t always happen.

That’s because it’s so easy to become overly-confident about the basics. The scales are in the same places they’ve always been. The strings are tuned to the same tension. A 60 BPM metronome click is always the same speed.

So what happens if I skip a day of practice? Or two days? A week? You’d swear I took a year off. Musicians and other artists frequently look to their idols for the answers. If I could only practice guitar like Joe Satriani, then I’d be a virtuoso. If I could train at the gym like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime, I’d transform into a Greek statue. If I studied film at New York University, I could make movies like Martin Scorsese.

While following in others’ footsteps probably won’t make you worse, it won’t make you particularly great. Great artists master the basics and then spend a lifetime choosing which rules to follow and which rules to break. Their strengths and weaknesses help to define their work.

Everyone will notice if your work feels derivative. You’re trying so hard to be like your idols that an audience would do better to go to the source. When your work fails to connect, you’ve neglected the basics. You’ve tried to skip too many steps.

If your writing is stale, go back and review basic grammar and sentence structure. If your music sounds like everyone else, go back to scales, chords and metronomes. If your photographs are boring you, review the parts of a camera and how to compose a shot.

Which basic components do you excel at? Which ones are a waste of your time?