10/01 - Setting Goals

Hey. Sorry I didn't post yesterday. I already got called out by my mom on it. Haha. So I'll do an extra one today.

Everyone makes goals. When it's crunch time, you say, I'm going to get this and this and this done, and those count as goals. If you do those things, you accomplish your goal, and if you don't, you fall short.

Well, I've come to realize that college is crunch time almost all the time. These are the four (or more) years you're paying for your education, and it's your duty to get the most you possibly can with your money. And once you get out with your degree, you have to pay bills and sign papers and have a job and live a real life, even if you're in grad school; I really have these four years to grow the most.

So I've started setting daily goals, for almost everything I need to improve upon. For snare drum, I need to sight read, learn an etude, play through another, and work on inverted flam taps, cheese fives, and flamacues. Those are pretty simple; if I do them, that's all there is to it. For mallets, I need to sight read, learn an etude, learn another five measures in my solo, and practice my technique a lot. Probably an hour and a half.

The more specific your goals are, the more you will improve. If you say, I need to learn some of my solo today, how much will you learn? A couple bars? But when you say, I need to learn measures A-B, not only are you more likely to improve, but you'll probably improve a lot more than if you don't specify a quantity.

The best thing about goals is that when you don't meet them, you still improve, as long as you gave an honest effort. If you try to make a light bulb and you try ten times and don't succeed, you now know ten ways that don't work. If you don't make it to measure B in that solo, you fell a couple measures short, at least you learned some and you now know more than what you knew before.

So don't underestimate the power of self motivation. You are your best motivation. You are the best at pushing yourself to become better. And when you define what you need to improve, when, and how, it's hard not to succeed.