practice, practice, practice

From January 2013:

Remember the old joke about the aspiring musician who stopped a man on the street in New York City and asked, “Excuse me, sir. Can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall”? To which the stranger replied, “Practice, practice, practice.”

Wherever you are in your practice, whatever your practice is, if you want to improve, keep at it. It can be hard to resist comparison with others – teachers, friends, celebrities, strangers, neighbors, siblings – but resist you must! Your practice is for you and you alone. 

It doesn’t matter what you are practicing. Maybe you’re learning to play the piano. Or you want to make a great beef stew. Could be you’re trying to incorporate regular exercise into your routine. Perhaps you want to master a new language. Maybe your goal is to identify all the birds in your backyard. Or you are trying to perform a random act of kindness each day, or reduce screentime. Regardless of what you choose to practice, remember this: Don’t judge yourself, but do measure your progress. How?

Set small, incremental goals. Take the practice of daily meditation as an example. If you commit to setting aside 10 minutes a day, you can easily confirm whether you’ve done it or not. And small goals help us assess where we are, so if 10 minutes a day isn’t doable, cut it back to 5 and start there. Assuming you meet that goal, set another, related goal. For instance, you create a self-assessment scale of 1 to 5 to measure how you feel after meditation with a goal of reaching 4 or 5 at least four days each week. Again, measurable. Easy to mark increments. And easy to adjust as you gain mastery over each small step. But avoid thinking, “I did this, therefore I am good; I didn’t do this, therefore I am bad.” That’s just pride or shame – meaningless and undermining. You aren’t good or bad here; you are learning or you are not.

Contrary to the adage “practice makes perfect,” mastery is the real goal, not perfection. Who wants perfection, after all? How boring. There would be nothing left to learn and, therefore, no need to continue. Mastery on the other hand, gives a sense of accomplishment – we can look back at the goals we have met; but it always allows us to go deeper – we can set new goals. You may have noticed that many masters are also students at the same time.

No matter where you are in your practice and no matter what you are practicing, there is always something new to learn. If you want to be a master, practice, practice, practice. As most masters know, it is the journey itself that matters, and you are already the master of your own journey. You always have been. 

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1/12/2026