🧠 What if you only practiced one thing?

Hey music maker!

Week 3 got hard.

Really hard.

I've been feeling discouraged this week. The time pressure I knew was coming…is worse than I expected. Business tasks are taking longer than planned. Family obligations are stacking up. Things are just popping up nonstop.

When you're struggling like this, there are usually just two instincts: try to do more, or give up entirely.

I did something different.

I've been watching my three kids learn things, and I noticed that they usually hyper-focus on one skill at a time until they conquer it.

My youngest has been wanting to be more mobile. So he started pushing his body forward, rocking on his hands and knees, trying to coordinate everything. At first, it was messy, one leg just dragging while the other three limbs figured out the necessary pattern. Recently, that fourth leg came in, and suddenly, he had the full crawl down.

Then he moves on to the next thing.

Around 9months my kids have either focused on moving fast or speaking clearly. Not both. One singular thing, over and over, until they get it.

That's what I needed to do this week.

The shift: If I only have time for one thing, let me do it really well.

Kobe Bryant talked about this. He decided what kind of basketball player he wanted to be, then built an inventory of all the skills that would get him there. Then he worked on each one, systematically. One at a time.

He always said, "Don't look at the mountain. Look at each step you have to take to climb it."

That's what was getting me discouraged, looking at the mountain. All the things I needed to learn.

So I stopped looking at the mountain and started focusing on taking good steps. Making each step count.

Here's what also helped me push through this mental slump:

I'm in week 3 of a 26-week experiment. WEEK 3.

Daniel Coyle talks about the eight-week threshold in "The Little Book of Talent."

The idea of eight weeks shows up everywhere: Navy SEALs conditioning, Meadowmount Music School, Bolshoi Ballet, and even meditation studies. That's how long it takes to start seeing real neural changes.

The Navy SEALs don't expect results in week 3.

Neither should I.

Coyle's point: don't make judgments too early. Constructing neural circuitry takes time. Resilience and grit matter most in these early phases, even when you don't feel immediate improvement. So if I'm discouraged in week 3? That's normal. Keep at it.

Give my brain the time it needs to grow.

On bass: Ghost notes became my singular focus.

Every day, I sat down with one passage from Serpentine Fire. C minor pentatonic, moving from high string to low string, working at 55-65 BPM. I subdivided the metronome to sixteenth notes so I could hear every single note and make sure my ghost notes were tight and precise.

That's it. That was my entire bass practice this week.

I trusted that if I could get really good at ghost notes, it would tick off a skill that good bass players have. Ghost notes help with rhythm. They make your lines sound more musical without cluttering them with too many audible notes.

That's what I want.

So if that's all I'm focusing on this week, let me do a damn good job at it.

And I noticed: the passage got easier. Faster than expected. Because it was my central focus. One thing, every single day.

On guitar: Strumming.

If I couldn't get a lot of practice in, or if covering multiple things felt too mentally draining because of the discouragement, I told myself: just focus on strumming. That's a big win.

This is the most concentrated effort I've ever put into strumming. And it's coming together.

I'm actually noticing that I’ve been restricting my strumming arm by resting it on the top of my guitar. I adjusted my arm position (moving it forward to rest against the body) and my strumming is beginning to improve more.

I’m sitting with this one skill and troubleshooting daily.

Cal Newport writes about this in Slow Productivity. One of his three principles: obsess over quality.

Do fewer things, but do them really well.

Rather than blowing through the material to move on to something new, I focused on playing it cleanly. I drilled the parts that sounded sloppy. I pushed through desirable difficulty, bumping up the metronome speed, then making sure I could still play it clean.

I'm trusting that locking in high-quality, clean reps on these fundamentals will carry into everything I play in the future.

This connects to a principle called meta-learning that I learned from the Ultralearning book. I'm starting to build out my own skill inventory now. I'll share more about that process in next week's issue.

This week’s adjustment: When discouraged, do less. But do it better.

One skill. Every day. Done well.

Quick question: When practice gets overwhelming, do you try to do more or do you narrow your focus? What's your singular thing right now?

Hit reply, I'd love to hear how you handle the hard weeks.

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