Thank you so much.
When I was first approached to perform at TEDxRexburg,
I had every intention of sitting down and playing my piece,
taking a bow and being finished and not saying anything.
As an instrumental musician, I prefer to let my hands do the talking.
But when I heard the theme of TEDxRexburg,
which is "Rethinking the Ordinary,"
I decided that I wanted to talk to you all about the most ordinary thing in my life,
which is practice.
I did a little bit of estimating,
and in my lifetime,
I've spent 6,440 hours, approximately,
on the bench, practicing.
Now, we've all been told at some point in our life,
"Practice makes perfect."
Well, I'm here tonight to burst the bubble.
That's not true.
Practice does not make perfect.
Perfect practice makes perfect.
And tonight I want to share with you my three-step process to perfect practice.
Now, as a quick disclaimer,
I know that perfect is kind of an intimidating word.
I like to think of the Russian figure skater Evgeni Plushenko,
who, after he withdrew from the Winter Olympics,
said in an interview, in broken English,
"I'm not robot."
I'm not suggesting that we should try to become perfect robots,
just that we should strive
for the highest level of excellence that we each can possibly achieve.
That just doesn't roll off the tongue quite as nicely
as "Perfect practice makes perfect."
So, the first step in this process is consistency.
I had a lesson, a piano lesson, during my freshman year.
It was really discouraging for me;
I felt like I was making a lot of mistakes,
and I was just not really getting to where I needed to be,
and I sat down with my teacher and said, "I'm so discouraged.
I feel like I'm doing so badly."
And he said, "You just need to increase your sitting power."
I was, like, sitting power?
He basically said, "Sitting power is you're on the right track,
you're doing the right things,
but you're not doing them enough."
When we develop sitting power,
we develop the patience and the perseverance
to sit down and work at something.
Now, as another aside,
I recognize that most of this audience
is not going to go home tomorrow and practice a musical instrument.
I know I'm in the minority.
However, this applies to anything that we do in our lives
that's commonplace or ordinary.
And when we rethink the way we do ordinary things,
like me practicing,
our results become extraordinary.
So, sitting power.
I did a little bit more calculation.
In the past year,
I've spent 828 hours at the piano, practicing.
The bare minimum practice requirement for music performance major at BYU-Idaho
is three hours a day,
six days a week.
Now, admittedly, I am a millennial,
and we like our information short and to the point.
We are notorious for our lack of investment
and our penchant for getting bored easily
and not investing in things.
However, excellence was never achieved within the length of a tweet,
and this is why I think sitting power is so important.
When we are able to do things that we don't feel like doing,
sit down and put in the work and put in the time,
that's when we're able to get more work done.
So the next thing is evaluation.
Sitting power by itself is not enough.
I could sit at the piano for eight hours a day,
and if I was practicing mistakes,
it would actually be doing more harm than it does good.
My teacher - I refer to him, affectionately, as a crazed perfectionist.
At his most picky,
I once spent an entire lesson on the same three chords.
I would play them for you,
but I don't want to step down and back up -
it's a little precarious up here.
I will never forget those three chords.
It was a hard lesson.
But this is where perfection and striving for perfection in my practice
really comes into play
in this evaluation step.
I could sit down every day,
and if I played, from end-to-end, my piece,
inevitably made a few mistakes,
then patted myself on the back for, you know, getting 80% of it right
and then did it over and over and over again
until I met my allotted three hours a day
that's required for me to get course credit,
that would never really benefit me at all.
Instead, you have to split your activities up.
So there is stuff that I know is good,
stuff that I can do,
and I put that in the "I don't need to practice this as much" box.
Then there's also stuff that's not so good.
And in this step of evaluation, I ask myself two questions.
The first is, Was that perfect?
Now, there's that word again.
But, essentially, Was that right? Was it correct?
Did I play what the composer intended?
This can apply to any of us.
You know, Did I get the answer right on this test?
Did I do this task that I was given correctly?
If the answer is yes,
the next question you ask yourself is, Was that easy?
Did I get lucky?
Was I white-knuckling it around the corners,
or did I actually do it well
and it was natural for me and it was easy?
Now, if the answer to both those questions is yes,
you can take that thing that you're doing
and put it in the "I don't need to work on this so hard" box.
However, if the answer is no, that leads us -
which it often is -
that leads us to the last step of the process,
which is repetition.
Now, when I was young,
my teacher would give you what she called "skill spots."
She would go to the music,
and she would pick a measure or a small section
that she knew was tricky or challenging,
and she would put a little smiley-face star sticker on it
and then send me home to do repetitions.
Her required number?
My age.
So, 5 repetitions was not a problem.
12 repetitions I can handle.
16 repetitions, you know, whatever - it's not that many.
I've gotten to the point in my life
where 21 repetitions doesn't cut it anymore,
and so I developed a system
that makes me kind of accountable for my repetitions.
And this is just a scan that I took of one of my pieces,
and you can see these numbers on the sides.
I basically divided every single piece of music that I play
into, you know, 50 or 60 skill spots.
It's just that I use the whole piece now
instead of just a little, small part of it,
like my teacher used to.
Then, once I've done this -
I know this is a little bit small -
but I make a spreadsheet
and across the top you have the date
and across the bottom is sections,
and I go through,
and the number of repetitions that I do, I keep track of it.
So, if I was playing something 50 times a day, incorrectly,
I'd be enforcing a bad habit.
However, when I play something multiple times a week -
45 or 50 times a day -
and I'm playing it right,
I'm building, in my personal case, a tactile foundation.
I'm training my muscle memory how it feels to do something right.
So when I get in a situation where I'm nervous
or when I'm playing faster
or if I have a memory slip,
I can fall back on this tactile foundation that I've built,
and I know how to do something right.
Now, let's apply this to an athlete.
Someone who skis
does not think about every little anatomical shift that they have to make
in order to execute a turn.
They just do it because it's natural.
So, essentially, whatever it is that you're doing every day,
rethink it.
Get in touch with your inner crazed perfectionist,
like my teacher.
Increase your sitting power.
Work a little bit harder.
And train your instincts to do something excellent.
Just remember that in everything that you do,
practice does not make perfect.
Perfect practice makes perfect.
Thank you.
(Applause)