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渴望成功的你可曾準備好代價
來源：大耳朵英語 2012-05-17 09:19:59

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摘要： Have you ever thought why there are very few great people? I think there is probably only one great person out of 10,000 at best, and most probably much less than that. But why? Most people want to b

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　　Have you ever thought why there are very few great people? I think there is probably only one great person out of 10,000 at best, and most probably much less than that. But why? Most people want to be great, right? Why are there only very few of them? Here is the reason:

　　你有沒有想過為什麽成功的人那麽少？我想，大概在一萬個人裏有一個人能獲得成功就很好了。但是為什麽會這樣呢？我們大多數人都渴望成功，不是嗎？那為什麽成功的人還是屈指可數呢？原因如下：

　　Most people do not pay the price of greatness.

　　大多數人沒有為成功付出代價。

　　I think this one is quite obvious. Now, the next question is: why not? If there are so many people who want to be great, why only very few of them actually pay the price? The answer to these questions explains the difference between the almost 100% people who want to be great and the much less than 0.01% who actually be so。

　　這個答案顯而易見。那麽，就引出了下一個問題：為什麽有那麽多人想要成功，而隻有很少數的人願意為成功付出代價呢？這個問題的答案就能把0.01%真正獲得成功的人和幾乎是100%想要獲得成功的人給區分開來。

　　The reason why very few people actually pay the price is this: The road to greatness is continuously painful for long time.

　　極少數人願意為成功付出代價的真正原因在於：成功之路須要長期痛苦的堅持。

　　Greatness requires sacrifices and there is no sacrifice without pain. The kind of sacrifices required for greatness is the ones that make the process continuously painful for long time. If you want to be good it will be painful only every now and then, and many people can still handle it. But being great is a totally different level. The pain is much deeper and it is continuous. Very few people can endure this kind of pain and that’s why there are very few great people. Most people naturally choose things that bring pleasures to them. It’s unnatural to choose pain over pleasure, let alone doing it continuously for long time。

　　成功須要犧牲，而所有的犧牲都伴隨著痛苦。獲得成功所需要的犧牲是長期的、痛苦的。如果你的目標是優秀，那可能隻是“短痛”而已，很多人還是可以承受得住的。但是，想要成功，那麽所需要承受得就是“長痛”了。大多數人會選擇能給自己帶來快樂的事物，這是自然的選擇。很少有人會拋開快樂去選擇痛苦，更不用說是長期的痛苦了。

　　But that's what I believe is the secret to greatness: The secret to greatness is choosing pain over pleasures continuously for long time。

　　但是正是上述原因讓我相信，成功的秘密就在於：選擇痛苦而不是快樂，並能夠長期堅持承受痛苦。


How Many Hours a Day Should You Practice?
by Dr. Noa Kageyama · 193 comments


2 hours? 4 hours? 8 hours? 12 hours?

How much is enough?

Is there such a thing as practicing too much?

Is there an optimal number of hours that one should practice?


What Do Performers Say?

Some of the great artists of the 20th century have shared their thoughts on these questions. I once read an interview with Rubinstein (or it may have been Horowitz – I can’t remember exactly whom), in which he stated that nobody should have to practice more than four hours a day, explaining that if you needed to practice more than four hours a day, you probably weren’t doing it right.

Other great artists have expressed similar sentiments. Violinist Nathan Milstein is said to have once asked his teacher Leopold Auer how many hours a day he should be practicing. “If you practice with your fingers, no amount is enough,” was Auer’s response. “If you practice with your head, two hours is plenty.”

Heifetz also indicated that he never believed in practicing too much, and that excessive practice is “just as bad as practicing too little!” He claimed that he practiced no more than three hours per day on average, and that he didn’t practice at all on Sundays. You know, this is not a bad idea – one of my own teachers, Donald Weilerstein, once suggested that I establish a 24-hour period of time every week where I was not allowed to pick up my instrument.

What Do Psychologists Say?

When it comes to understanding expertise and expert performance, psychologist Dr. K. Anders Ericsson is perhaps the world’s leading authority. His research is the basis for the “ten-year rule” and “10,000-hour rule” which suggest that it requires at least ten years and/or 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve an expert level of performance in any given domain – and in the case of musicians, often closer to 25 years in order to attain an elite international level. Note that the real key here is not the amount of practice required but the type of practice required to attain an expert level of performance. In other words, just practicing any old way doesn’t cut it.

Mindless Practice

Have you ever listened to someone practice? Have you ever listened to yourself practice, for that matter? Tape yourself practicing for an hour, take a walk through the practice room area at school and eavesdrop on your fellow students, or ask your students to pretend they are at home and watch them practice during a lesson. What do you notice?

You’ll notice that the majority of folks practice rather mindlessly, either engaging in mere repetition (“practice this passage 10 times” or “practice this piece for 30 minutes”) or practicing on autopilot (that’s when we play through the piece until we hear something we don’t like, stop, repeat the passage again until it sounds better, and resume playing through the piece until we hear the next thing we aren’t satisfied with, at which point we begin this whole process over again).

There are three major problems with the mindless method of practicing.

1. It is a waste of time
Why? For one, very little productive learning takes place when we practice this way. This is how we can practice a piece for hours, days, or weeks, and still not feel that we’ve improved all that much. Even worse, you are actually digging yourself a hole by practicing this way, because what this model of practicing does do is strengthen undesirable habits and errors, literally making it more likely that you will screw up more consistently in the future. This makes it more difficult to correct these habits in the future – so you are actually adding to the amount of future practice time you will need in order to eliminate these bad habits and tendencies. I once worked with a saxophone professor who was fond of reminding his students that “Practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes permanent.”

2. It makes you less confident
In addition, practicing this way actually hurts your confidence, as there is a part of you that realizes you don’t really know how to consistently produce the results you are looking for. Even if you establish a fairly high success rate in the most difficult passages via mindless practice, and find that you can nail it 3 or 4 out of every 5 attempts, your confidence won’t grow much from this. Real on-stage confidence comes from (a) being able to nail it 10 out of 10 tries, (b) knowing that this isn’t a coincidence but that you can do it the correct way on demand, because most importantly (c) you know precisely why you nail it or miss it – i.e. you know exactly what you need to do from a technique standpoint in order to play the passage perfectly every time.

You may not be able to play it perfectly every time at first, but this is what repetition is for – to reinforce the correct habits until they are stronger than the bad habits. It’s a little like trying to grow a nice looking lawn. Instead of fighting a never-ending battle against the weeds, your time is better spent trying to cultivate the grass so that over time the grass crowds out the weeds.

And here’s the biggie. We tend to practice unconsciously, and then end up trying to perform consciously – not a great formula for success. Recall from this article that you have a tendency to shift over into hyper-analytical left brain mode when you walk out on stage. Well, if you have done most of your practicing unconsciously, you really don’t know how to play your piece perfectly on demand. When your brain suddenly goes into full-conscious mode, you end up freaking out, because you don’t know what instructions to give your brain.

3. It is tedious and boring
Practicing mindlessly is a chore. Music may be one of the only skill-based activities where practice goals are measured in units of time. We’ve all had teachers who tell us to go home and practice a certain passage x number of times, or to practice x number of hours, right? What we really need are more specific outcome goals – such as, practice this passage until it sounds like _____, or practice this passage until you can figure out how to make it sound like _____.

After all, it doesn’t really matter how much time we spend practicing something – only that we know how to produce the results we want, and can do so consistently, on demand.

Deliberate Practice

So what is deliberate, or mindful practice? Deliberate practice is a systematic and highly structured activity, which is, for lack of a better word, scientific. Instead of mindless trial and error, it is an active and thoughtful process of experimentation with clear goals and hypotheses. Violinist Paul Kantor once said that the practice room should be like a laboratory, where one can freely tinker with different ideas, both musical and technical, to see what combination of ingredients produces the result you are looking for.

Deliberate practice is often slow, and involves repetition of small and very specific sections of your repertoire instead of just playing through (e.g. working on just the opening note of your solo to make sure that it “speaks” exactly the way you want, instead of playing the entire opening phrase).

Deliberate practice involves monitoring one’s performance (in real-time, but also via recordings), continually looking for new ways to improve. This means really listening to what happens, so that you can tell yourself exactly what went wrong. For instance, was the first note note sharp? Flat? Too loud? Too soft? Too harsh? Too short? Too long?

Let’s say that the note was too sharp and too long with not enough of an attack to begin the note. Well, how sharp was it? A little? A lot? How much longer was the note than you wanted it to be? How much more of an attack did you want?

Ok, the note was a little sharp, just a hair too long, and required a much clearer attack in order to be consistent with the marked articulation and dynamics. So, why was the note sharp? What did you do? What do you need to do to make sure the note is perfectly in tune every time? How do you ensure that the length is just as you want it to be, and how do you get a consistently clean and clear attack to begin the note so it begins in the right character?

Now, let’s imagine you recorded all of this and could listen to how this last attempt sounded. Does that combination of ingredients give you the desired result? In other words, does that combination of ingredients convey the mood or character you want to communicate to the listener as effectively as you thought it would?

Few musicians take the time to stop, analyze what went wrong, why it happened, and how they can correct the error permanently.

How Many Hours a Day Should I Practice?

You will find that deliberate practice is very draining, given the tremendous amount of energy required to keep one’s full attentional resources on the task at hand. Practicing more than one hour at a time is likely to be unproductive and in all honesty, probably not even mentally or emotionally possible. Even the most dedicated individuals will find it difficult to practice more than four hours a day.

Studies have varied the length of daily practice from 1 hour to 8 hours, and the results suggest that there is often little benefit from practicing more than 4 hours per day, and that gains actually begin to decline after the 2-hour mark. The key is to keep tabs on the level of concentration you are able to sustain.

5 Keys For More Effective Practice

1. Duration
Keep practice sessions limited to a duration that allows you to stay focused. This may be as short as 10-20 minutes for younger students, and as long as 45-60 minutes for older individuals.

2. Timing
Keep track of times during the day when you tend to have the most energy. This may be first thing in the morning, or right before lunch, etc. Try to do your practicing during these naturally productive periods as these are the times at which you will be able to focus and think most clearly.

3. Goals
Try using a practice notebook. Keep track of your practice goals and what you discover during your practice sessions. The key to getting into the “zone” when practicing is to be constantly striving to have clarity of intention. In other words, to have a clear idea of the sound you want to produce, or particular phrasing you’d like to try, or specific articulation, intonation, etc. that you’d like to be able to execute consistently.

When you figure something out, write it down. As I practiced more mindfully, I began learning so much during practice sessions that if I didn’t write everything down, I’d forget.

4. Smarter, not harder
Sometimes if a particular passage is not coming out the way we want it to, it just means we need to practice more. There are also times, however, when we don’t need to practice harder, but need an altogether different strategy or technique.

I remember struggling with the left-hand pizzicato variation in Paganini’s 24th Caprice. I was getting frustrated and kept trying harder and harder to make the notes speak, but all I got was sore fingers, a couple of which actually started to bleed. I realized that there had to be a smarter, more effective way to accomplish my goal.

Instead of stubbornly keeping at a strategy or technique that wasn’t working for me, I forced myself to stop practicing this section altogether. I tried to brainstorm different solutions to the problem for a day or so, and wrote down ideas to try as they occurred to me. When I felt that I came up with some promising solutions, I just started experimenting. I eventually came up with a solution that I worked on over the next week or so, and when I played the caprice for my teacher, he actually asked me how I made the notes speak so clearly!

5. Problem-solving model
Consider this 6-step general problem-solving model summarized below (adapted from various problem solving processes online).

Define the problem (what do I want this note/phrase to sound like?)
Analyze the problem (what is causing it to sound like this?)
Identify potential solutions (what can I tweak to make it sound more like I want?)
Test the potential solutions to select the most effective one (what tweaks seem to work best?)
Implement the best solution (make these changes permanent)
Monitor implementation (do these changes continue to produce the results I’m looking for?)
Or simpler yet, check out this model from Daniel Coyle’s book The Talent Code.

Pick a target
Reach for it
Evaluate the gap between the target and the reach
Return to step one
It doesn’t matter if we are talking about perfecting technique, or experimenting with different musical ideas. Any model which encourages smarter, more systematic, active thought, and clearly articulated goals will help cut down on wasted, ineffective practice time.

After all, who wants to spend all day in the practice room? Get in, get stuff done, and get out!
To seek inspiration or to create?
Posted June 12th, 2012




When is it enough?

When, and for how long, should you dedicate yourself to seeking out inspiration for your creative work, versus when should you know that you’ve seen enough inspiration to get started creating?

Compare the writer who merely reads great stories repeatedly to the writer who constantly writes but seeks out no inspiration. Who would write a better book? Or the artist who diligently studies the timeless masterpieces of her trade, compared with an artist who takes no formal training and seeks out no inspirational wisdom but merely paints day and night. Who is more likely to create a next historic artwork?

You could spend more than half of your work time seeking out inspiration and exploring options for what it is you want to create, but that won’t do you any good if you aren’t finding the time to actually create something. Additionally, you can’t expect to create something truly great without first understanding other ideas in the same realm of what it is you’re creating.

As a creative: you have to be able to think on your own, to formulate your own ideas. But the best way to come up with something original is to combine inspiration. In-fact: all ideas are a result of combining other ideas, naturally in the brain.

So how do you know when enough inspiration is enough?

It’s too easy to convince yourself that you don’t have the right inspiration, that you need more. That’s laziness. On the other hand, it’s just as easy to convince yourself that you don’t need inspiration when you really do, in order to not create subpar things. That’s egotistical.

To know when you should stop seeking inspiration and just get to work takes effort. You have to continuously keep that in mind to be a successful creative.

There are going to be days when you waste time seeking out inspiration, scrolling endlessly through blogs and browsing around museums or conferences or listening to lectures or podcasts for hours on end. That’s alright. You’re also going to experience times when you dive into a project and realize you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing, that a bit of inspiration would have gone a long way. That’s alright too. Both situations are the perfect opportunity to learn what’s the right amount of inspiration for you.

The right amount of inspiration is going to vary from person to person. If you’re just starting out with writing, you’re going to need a lot of time to seek out inspiration every day. If you’re a professional writer, on the other hand, you probably shouldn’t be spending an hour every day reading about writing. That doesn’t mean that the expert writer/artist/dancer/musician/teacher/professional isn’t looking for inspiration because they’re already an expert, it just means they’re spending more time creating than seeking out ideas.

The real key is to realize when you’re tricking yourself into believing you need inspiration or not. That’s something you have to hone over time. Fortunately you can start today, right now. As you’re reading this ask yourself: “Am I just wasting time when I should be creating or experimenting instead?”

If, at any time of the day, the answer to that question is “no” or “maybe” then close the web browser, turn off the video or the podcast, lock yourself in a room and get to work.

Photo by Chase Elliott Clark.

You should free write even if you’re not a writer.
Posted June 8th, 2012




By the time you finish reading this your brain will have burned through roughly 5 calories.

That’s because the human brain goes through an average of 1.5 calories a minute, using up glucose to fire neurons and send electrical signals back and forth between the millions and millions of tiny networks throughout your head and body.

While it may not seem like much, the constant processing your brain does can take a toll. Consider the last time you had to study for a big project, or when you were so intently focused on something that your head began to hurt. After only a few minutes of deep concentration, your brain can start to tire and the connections can slow down. Your body will start to reserve energy for thinking by exhausting other systems, which is why you might feel physically exhausted after a long day at work or school.

Thinking can be exhausting.

Fortunately, free writing can make processing ideas in your brain a little easier. In-fact: free writing is known to be stress-relieving and idea generating at the same time. How’s it work exactly?

When you sit down to get your thoughts out on paper (or in a digital notepad), you do two essential things for creative thinking: the first is that you focus your attention on just one topic, which means your brain doesn’t have to stress making too many connections at the same time. By focusing on whatever it is you’re writing, you are dedicating more parts of your brain to working through a singular idea or problem. Because of the forced focus, free writing is the easiest way to explore thoughts.

The second thing that occurs when you free write is that you feel an unburdening of thoughts. When you express your thoughts in a physical way that you can visually see, your brain tends to “let go” of those same thoughts. Think of it as unloading thoughts that would otherwise take up room in your brain.

These two things alone explain why free writing can make you feel good and help alleviate some of the stress and exhaustion that comes from thinking so hard.

To get the most out of free writing, consider setting a timer for at least 15 minutes, or setting a goal to reach a certain number of words every single day. I like to use 750 Words for my daily dose of free writing, but there are plenty of other apps and websites you can use to write. You don’t even need any fancy software or tools, just grab a sheet of paper and a pencil or open up the notebook app on your computer and start writing.

Get some thoughts out on paper right now, without worrying about grammar or punctuation or a specific topic. Write to explore what’s going on in your brain, and you’ll not only feel better, but you may discover new ideas along the way. In-fact, this entire article was inspired by a free writing session I had the other day.

Side note: if you like reading Creative Something, you should subscribe by email to get the latest articles every week. It’s free and takes less than a minute.