The Best Way to Stay Consistent.

Believe it or not, building a career as a composer is a lot like the act of bodybuilding!

((I’m convinced this isn’t a real gym—the weights are never where they’re supposed to be…))

I’ve been going to the gym for about a year-and-a-half now, and like many other gym-rats, I started out with many assumptions about what I had to do to see results.

Assumptions like: I’d need to be in the gym seven days a week for two hours each day, and I’d constantly need to push my body to the point of exhaustion every time. Thankfully, that’s only about 45% correct (give or take…).

In the gym, efficient and concentrated efforts, repeated over the longest period of time, are always going to yield more results than crazy-intense workouts that you can barely recover from; let alone repeat on a consistent basis week after week.

Our careers are quite the same!

It’s so much better to set aside 30-minutes of quality practice time each day, with a specific goal in mind, than to sit at your workspace and aimlessly “work hard,” for hours. It’s hard work to bench-press a heavy weight for three sets of 30 repetitions (I may or may not be guilty of this…), but I guarantee you: you’re going to hurt yourself with that plan before you see results, if any at all.

The takeaway here is: if you don’t work with intention, you’ll never get anything done. Worse still: you’ll never see results, nor progress, no matter how much time you put in. If, like me, you’ve ever sat at your workspace for an entire afternoon with no results to show for it, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Here’s how to start implementing this ‘do-less/get-more’ strategy!

Write down one skill that you plan on practicing for each day of the week. It could be melody, harmony, counterpoint, analysis, etc. Then, in a little bullet-point underneath, write a specific element of that skill you’re going to hone. Perhaps you’ll experiment with a new chord progression you discovered the other day, or analyze the main melody from your favorite piece of music!

Finally: write down an amount of time that you can put-in for each day! Anywhere from 5-60 minutes tends to do the trick! At the end of that interval, you’ll have practiced and learned something new; and therefore, taken a concrete step towards success!

The best part? You’ll still have enough energy to do it again tomorrow, and next week, and next month! That’s a LOT of steps forward!