Sisyphus versus the snowball

The key to progress is consistent, mindful effort. Depending upon our approach to practice, our motivation can either feel like a boulder or a snowball. Let’s take two students. Both are inspired beginners and both practice 3 hours per week. Both are equally “talented,” but at the end of one year, the second cellist has progressed much farther than the first.

The first cellist sits down to practice twice a week, giving himself 90 minutes to work on his weekly assignments. At the end of each practice session he feels accomplished because he is exhausted and for the next day or two the muscles in his hands are sore, reminiscent of those intense gym workouts he used to do in his early twenties.

The second cellist has a different approach. She spends thirty minutes a day practicing six days a week. Because she wants to cover all of her different assignments each time she sits down, she only has 5-10 minutes per task, and this forces her to really focus since there is no time to waste. Without knowing it, she is also building momentum because she’s touching the instrument almost daily, and her muscle memory is allowing her to pickup from wherever she left off the day before.

The first cellist reminds me of Sisyphus, exerting maximum effort periodically so that without knowing it, the boulder representing his motivation has time to roll backwards between each practice session. The second cellist has made a small snowball and is rolling it methodically down a gentle slope; it isn’t rolling on it’s own yet, but as the learning curve gets steeper (and thus requires more motivation), her snowball will grow and it will take less and less effort to find the motivation to face -and conquer- each subsequent challenge. The first cellist will only struggle more as the learning curve gets steeper, and eventually he will feel as hopeless as Sisyphus himself.

Here’s another thing to consider: let’s say both cellists have now been playing two years and are inspired enough to practice 6 hours per week since the music they are working on is more complicated, beautiful, and rewarding. Assuming the same daily schedules, the first cellist will have to sit down twice a week and put in 3 hours straight to get his work in. If he is really challenging himself, his attention span will max out around 40 minutes in, and the other 2 hours 20 minutes he will be working at a mental deficit.

By contrast, the second cellist simply has to practice 30 minutes more per day, and what’s an extra half hour when she’s making great progress and had already decided to carve out some time every day to work on her new passion.