SAMBA Blog

Banging on the Keys

After a concert, a woman gushed to Beethoven about how enthralled she was by his music.

"Oh, sir, I wish I could play like you! It's genius the music you create!"

Beethoven: "Well maam. If you want to practice 8 hours a day for 30 years, you could most certainly play that way also."

She didn't expect that.

To Beethoven, his performance was not a one-off coincidence where talent met opportunity. To him, it was the culmination of effort and sweat put into his practice daily. The woman, only aware of the performance, didn't give the process the respect it deserved. Honoring the process matters. It's the thing that matters.

Good bloggers are good because they practice. They refine their skill and tone and do it everyday. They battle perfectionism and procrastination and just sit down and do the work. Artists and real writers do it everyday even if it's just one line or one a stroke of the brush.

Don't fret if you're not where you want to be with your skills yet. That's not the hard part.
Fret when you don't want to practice those skills everyday. Fret when you invent stories to escape practicing.

Thinking small to think big

Big is good. Or at least that’s what we always tell ourselves.

We like the grand gesture, the huge improvement, the splashy show. If it’s not big (and now), it’s easy for us to believe it didn’t really happen.

So it’s tempting to look for the one big thing you can do to change your life. The one big thing you can do to lose weight or find love or make money or be happy. We want the one big thing that will just fix everything and do it immediately. We (and yes, I mean me) want to just be there already.

But there is no one big thing. Hate to accept that fact, but Seth is right. Nothing changes everything. There are a thousand incremental changes, daily decisions, miniature revolutions required to move from where you are today to where you want to be. The real challenge isn’t making the small changes. It’s understanding that you need to commit to small changes, that you won’t get your end result just yet. It’s figuring out the right small changes to get you to the result you want. It’s accepting that you won’t get there tomorrow or next week or even next month.

But if you want to get there at all, you have to identify the small changes and be willing to make them. Without the small steps, you’re just kidding yourself about making it the thousand miles.