I restarted playing classical guitar in 2018 and then stopped in early 2021 when life got extremely busy. Despite repeated efforts to start playing again consistently, I just haven’t been able to keep the habit going.
I listened to one of T. Harv Eker’s Tough Love Calls recently and he suggested that to start a new habit you can do so by doing the activity for 1 minute a day. I thought, that is ridiculous but let me try.
On the first day I simply unpacked my guitar, tuned it, and set up the music stand. That was enough for 1 minute. On the second day I chose a piece to learn and played a few of the notes. The third day I played the piece a bit more. On the fourth day I picked a difficult part of the piece and just practiced that. Each day I was playing more. It’s probably been about 3 weeks now and I have played every single day and have now learnt a full song!
As someone who is always trying to live a dynamic and interesting life and implement new habits I am simply stunned at how effective this has been. I actively look forward to playing the guitar every day now and I usually end up playing between 20 and 40 minutes a day or so. The great thing is that the pressure is off.
There have been one or two days where I’ve been very tired and I have just played for like 2 or 3 minutes. I am quite surprised though that even those sessions have been effective. It seems like consistently doing an activity every day, even if it’s just a little bit, gets your brain to learn and remember what you’re doing. I think that one is “keeping it fresh” so that one doesn’t start forgetting.
The other great thing about this approach is that it shows you what you really enjoy doing. If you enjoy the activity you will want to do more of it. As you get better at it you will also naturally want to do more of it. If one sets a goal of something like “play for 1 hour every day”, you might have lost before you’ve started because on some days you just don’t have the time or inclination to play for such a long time. This method works great with the natural rhythms of life. Energy and interest fluctuate day to day, so there is no pressure or force involved when you set the bar low in terms of the day investment. Pressure and force can be useful for the short term, but for cultivating a long term habit they can quickly lead to burn out in my experience.
So, anyways, don’t let such a small habit fool you! Power comes in small packages sometimes. I will be trying this with other habits and report back. Give it a bash and let me know what you think.