“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
-Winston Churchill
Persistence is defined as “firm or obstinate continuance in a course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition.”
If you wish to excel at guitar, or anything else, persistence is going to be absolutely necessary. All too often, when we meet difficulty or opposition, the easy path, and the one frequently taken, is to simply give up.
This however, it’s not the way to excellence.
The more difficult, and necessary, road is to persist despite all obstacles, and to be determined to succeed no matter how hard we must work at it.
Over my many years of teaching the guitar I have noticed that persistence is, by far, the attribute which best determines whether a student meets with failure or success.
Unfortunately, while I can offer encouragement and advice, I cannot teach someone how to be persistent. That is a choice which the student must make for themselves. If the student wants to learn badly enough, and if their mind is made up to learn, there will be success. What I can do is to offer three, easy to follow, pieces of advice which will aid the student in being more persistent about their practice.
1) Schedule a daily practice time. If you choose to practice whenever you ‘feel like it’ or when you ‘have time’ you are already on the road to disappointment. Make it a priority and determine that, at the set time every day, you will practice. We set aside time for our favorite TV shows, podcasts, video games, and the like. In the same way, schedule time for your daily practice. We are often creatures of habit. If we schedule time every day for practice, and it becomes part of our daily routine, then it becomes much easier to be persistent about our practice. The results will surely follow.
2) Set aside a dedicated practice space. Even if this is little more than a music stand and a chair, if we have a dedicated place in which we go to practice every day, free from distraction, it becomes much easier to develop the routine. In my experience, students who have a dedicated practice space in their home learn much more quickly and achieve much better results than those who do not. Studies have shown that simply owning a music stand increases the average musician’s practice time by 30%.
3) Go slowly and take small steps. This is an excellent, and oft overlooked strategy. You will learn much more quickly, and will avoid a lot of frustration if you choose to practice and master small, easy concepts and pieces. By developing a firm foundation of fundamental principles, the more complex concepts and techniques become much easier to learn. Frustration is a common impediment to persistence, so do not take on more than you can handle.
While these three steps will be of great help in your progress, we must expect that there will come times when persistence will still be required.
There will be some things which are more challenging to learn than others.
Persist.
There will be times when you lose interest or just don’t feel like practicing.
Persist.
Anything worth doing is worth doing well, and doing things well often requires persistence. Make up your mind to be the best that you can be. Have the persistence to overcome whatever challenges you face along the way
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