-
“Based on the book ‘Outliers’ from Malcolm Gladwell, to excel in anything in life, any human being will need at least 10K hours of practicing such target. Bottom line, keep moving and paying attention on your progress that you learn from it and get better…and better. This is what happens in life. You don’t master in something to live; you just live each day doing your best and learning from it.”
This is “spot-on.” Think about it this way. If you practiced one daily challenge for 10K hours, you might get pretty good at playing that challenge and perhaps not. But it is almost certain that you would not become a very good guitar player by doing that.
While it is true that repetition is important to learning, especially as we grow older it seems, it is also important to have variety. For physical fitness, it is important to vary your training routine. Otherwise the adaptations that take place make it easier to do one thing and there is a tapering off of growth. TAC is designed to cycle you through different aspects and skills, keeping it from becoming a set “routine.”
One relatively new aspect of TAC is the “benchmark” weeks that were introduced a while back. These are a way of showing you that you are making progress. Certain series of lessons come along every three months or so. If you take notes, it should be obvious that it is easier to play them the second time versus the first, and that you continue to get better each time you see that set of lessons.
I don’t personally enjoy the goal setting and note taking, so I don’t do that myself. I just trust the process and continue to play through all the daily lessons each month.
The goal-setting, 90-day check-ups, benchmark weeks etc. were introduced long after I started TAC. When I first joined, I was logging into TAC every day and completing the daily lessons. That was where we started, because it’s all there was, except there was a “points” system that “rewarded” you completing a month of lessons, for posting “Hi – I’m the new kid on the block” message in the forum, for watching a video that explained what you need to do to mark a lesson complete, for learning and posting one of the songs from the vault, etc. Somehow it was made clear to me from the beginning that the commitment was to just do my best to play the lesson for a minimum of 10 minutes, then mark it complete with no expectation of reaching a level of competence.
I continue to be amazed how frequently people express that they are frustrated or feeling lost early in the program. One thing we can bet on is that there will continue to be threads like this one. It’s over seven years now since I joined TAC, but I can remember introductory material that I watched that made me understand not to expect to be able to play the dailies well after 10 minutes or even a half hour – just to give it an honest effort, mark it complete and move on. Have we lost that with all these newer introductory materials – 30 days to play, etc.?
I no longer visit TAC every day and I typically batch the lessons into one or two sessions a week. (I guess I’m a bit of a renegade, but I paid for the lessons so I use them the way it best suits me.). I still play my guitar every day, typically for an hour or more. A lot of that is song practice rather than skill building. So I’m not always doing things exactly as designed these days, but I still believe there is enough value in practicing every one of the dailies for at least 10 minutes, even if it’s not on the day they are assigned and I end up doing four or five dailies in a single day. Now that I’m in the program for over seven years, I can usually play the dailies pretty well after 10 minutes, but not always. I would not continue doing these same lessons over and over if I did not believe I was deriving a benefit.
I believe the benefits of TAC reveal themselves over time. I think expectation to master the lessons day by day is one of the most detrimental things to progress. One other thing I learned on my first day of TAC was to end each session with a positive feeling – to try to identify a small win each time I play. That would have been hard to do if I started out expecting to master the dailies. Maybe that is no longer being explained to new members.