Transforming your music life: the power of habit.

Cultivating the right habits can go further than you think.

This is part of human nature: our minds want predictability. By predictability I mean moments that don’t require much judgment and brainwork, because we’ve been in similar situations before and know how to react.

This can be simultaneously good and bad. We need to automate some of the daily activities in life, otherwise we would have to reinvent the wheel every time we brushed our teeth or drove our car. It might sound strange, but Duke University researchers found that 40% of our daily activities are not conscious decisions, they are habits. During that time, our brain can focus on other, more vital issues, saving valuable time.

On the other hand, there is the ‘fear of new’, which pushes us back to our comfort zone every time we have to make novel decisions we haven’t tested before or encounter new information we don’t know whether we should trust. We happily delegate our decisions to others, so we don’t have to deal with those things. A typical demonstration of such a claim is that we allow our job to define our daily timetable, our goals and social circles. We feel safe in conformity, in other words, and sometimes we ignore things we should challenge ourselves to search more about.

This causes some implications in our lives. There are things in this world we don’t know about. We encounter them every day, we learn to live with them, but we take them for granted and never dig further, all because of the safety that conformity provides us.

Enter habits.

Habits is one of these areas we rarely think about. How much do we know about how important ‘routine’ is for a human being, how the brain works when we develop habits and why we need to automate a portion of our activities? I guess the answer for most of us is: not much.

Habits can transform our way of life, as they allow us to strategically multitask and prioritize our daily actions.

When you create a habit, you let the brain work subconsciously on certain activities, saving you energy for issues you’ll have to be actively involved in, aka make decisions.

Regardless how much we know or sinfully ignore, successful people have realized that, by patiently implementing the right habits, they can accelerate their effort towards efficiency, long-term productivity and, eventually, success.

Personally, I started streamlining my efforts towards automation of certain parts of my life, such as writing every day, not checking social media constantly, accomplishing certain small goals daily etc.

How can musicians benefit from this?

What’s the price of all this?

You don’t need to develop a lot of habits. Just three.

Against the common belief around musicians that you have to become a ‘soul-less robot’ and ‘control freak’, which may affect your magic ability to produce art, acquiring the mindset of a modern musician that has the potential to succeed both artistically and entrepreneurially starts by strategically augmenting the following key habits.

1. Set goals, write them, share them publicly.

2. Read. Then read some more.

3. Discipline yourself.

I’ll analyze them in the next article of the #Musicpreneur series, so follow me on Twitter @TommyDarker or the Musicpreneur collection.

What habits have you developed in your music life and helped you?