A few weeks ago, hours after preaching on persistence, interestingly enough, I read a great story about the diligence of Steve Martin. In it, the author begins with a quote of a 2007 interview of Martin …
I remember getting my first banjo, and reading the book saying ‘this is how you play the C chord,’ and I put my fingers down to play the C chord and I couldn’t tell the difference. But I told myself just stick with this, just keep playing, and one day you’ll have been playing for 40 years, and at this point, you’ll know how to play.
As the article points out, Martin released his first album in 2009 (“The Crow”), 50 years after picking up the banjo. It won a Grammy (he was nominated for his second one last month). The author concludes, “getting good at something is not to be taken lightly; it’s a pursuit measured in years, not weeks.”
The article says …
If you collapse Martin’s skills into a flat list, he sounds like a Renaissance man, but if you take a snapshot of any particular point of his life, you’ll encounter relentless, longterm focus on a very small number of things.
I also like this challenge …
We’ve created this fantasy world where everyone is just 30 days of courage boosting exercises and life hacks away from living an amazing life. But when you study people like Martin, who really do live remarkable lives, you almost always encounter stretches of years and years dedicated to honing craft.
That reminds me of what I recently read in The Circle Maker by Mark Batterson (which I will be blogging about soon). In talking about a “persistence quotient,” Batterson contends, “There are no shortcuts. There are no substitutes. Success is a derivative of persistence” (70).
For example, Batterson reports …
More than a decade ago, Anders Ericsson and his colleagues at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music did a study with musicians. With the help of professors, they divided violinists into three groups: world-class soloists, good violinists, and those who were unlikely to play professionally. All of them started playing around roughly the same age and they practiced about the same amount of time until the age of eight. That is when their practice habits diverged. The researchers found that by the age of twenty, the average players had logged about four thousand hours of practice time; the good violinists totaled about eight thousand hours; and the elite performers set the standard with ten thousand hours. While there is no denying that innate ability dictates some of your upside potential, your potential is only tapped via persistent effort. Persistence is the magic bullet and the magic number seems to be ten thousand. (70)
Batterson quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin …
The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve a level of mastery associated with being a world class expert—in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain that long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery. (70)
So, what are you doing to hone your craft? Are you logging enough hours to reach a level that truly honors God?