This Can Help EVERY Guitarist

You all know I discuss the topics that matter when others don’t. Posture, non-sense sponsorships…Parker guitars ;). But in all seriousness...

I’m happy to announce my free lecture on improving on guitar: mindset, motivation, practice routines, EVERYTHING.

There is also a very affordable, short companion ebook that has more details and an area for you to organize your thoughts. Like always, I decided to pick the most unsexy topic: no magic licks or secrets to shredding, just the raw truth about what it takes to enjoy music for a lifetime.

-If you have “get better at guitar” as a 2023 goal, this will help you.

-If you ever quit or wanted to quit the guitar, give this a shot.

-If you ever wanted an affordable way to support my efforts, this is it!

I will include a passage from the book below. Improvement is a constant journey, so I hope to update the ebook and make a new video every couple of years as my thoughts on the topics continue to develop.

I’m also wrapping up 4, yes 4, new rhythm guitar courses. They will be done in time for Christmas, and in time for you to prepare for your rhythm-guitar new year’s resolution. If you watched the video on my 2023 goals, you know that I am going to be taking my guitar playing to a new level in 2023. I’ll be using the rhythm guitar courses myself as part of that process!

From the book:

Goal Setting & Assessment

Introduction

Goal setting is, of course, an old tool for achievement, but I’ve seen many people discuss goal setting without discussing assessment. I believe these two concepts have to be linked: if you don’t know how to assess your progress, how can you be sure you are achieving your goals?

My current view of goal setting and assessment comprises four simple steps: 1) Setting the initial goal and assessment, 2) working on the goal, 3) assessment and 4) recalibrating/setting a new goal and assessment. Although these steps are simple, each can be expanded to create several sub-steps and micro goals. Before we discuss these steps in detail, I would like to share three of my recent goal discoveries.

The Three Goal Discoveries

Discoveries 1 & 2:

1)    The first and most important reason to set a goal is to have a sense of direction.

2)    The second most important reason is to achieve the goal.

I’m not claiming to have invented that thought, but I don’t recall hearing or reading it anywhere else. As humans, we naturally want to feel like we are progressing toward something. We want to work toward a job promotion, an expansion of the house, the new car we always wanted, and so on. Once we obtain that thing, we love it for a little while but then we start wanting to achieve the next thing. It’s in our nature. You’ve probably heard the cliche, “it’s the journey, not the destination.” In this case, setting a goal puts us on the journey. Along the journey, our goal will likely change. That is normal and to be expected. It is also the reason why achieving our goal is not the prime objective. Keep in mind that even if we change goals along the way, we would not have been in a position to change the goal if we were not on the journey. In other words, we cannot change goals in the future if we never had a goal to begin with. The opposite of not having a goal is far worse than we imagine.

Discovery 3:

3)    In a practical sense, there is no maintenance: there is only growth and deterioration.

Although I could use entropy theory to provide a pseudoscientific explanation of why discovery three is universally correct, the truth is, I don’t know if it is true from a literal/scientific perspective; however, after observing the habits and tendencies of many people in several disciplines, I believe the discovery to be mostly true from a practical standpoint. If nothing else, it is guaranteed to help you on your guitar journey. Here is the discovery with different wording: there is a false sense of having the ability to maintain a certain level of achievement. Let me give you a few examples to illustrate the point before returning to guitar.

Example 1:

In the bodybuilding world, there is a concept called bulking and cutting (If you are a bodybuilder, you may think this concept is outdated. That’s okay. So do I. Just follow my logic here). Bulking is the process of putting on excess fat and muscle and cutting is the process of losing the excess fat while maintaining the muscle. Depending on your personal biology, you find one harder than the other. This is similar to how many people find it hard to lose weight while the lucky few find it very hard to gain weight; however, even harder than cutting or bulking is maintaining. Ask 100 bodybuilders and at least 95 will tell you that when they aren’t putting on weight or losing weight they feel as though they lack a sense of direction. Without a sense of direction many start to move in the opposite direction of their goal. Instead of trying hard to lift heavier and heavier weights, they barely try during workouts and slowly lose strength over time. Instead of eating healthy, we allow more and more “snacks” or “cheats,” and gain the type of weight we don’t like.

Example 2:

If you ever tried learning a second language as an adult, you will quickly realize that you must continue to practice to improve. If you go one day without thinking in that language or working on your vocabulary you may be okay. However, if you go two days back-to-back, by day three you will notice an obvious slowness in your thought process. In other words, after just two days of not working on progress, you began to slide backward. At the same time, if you start to just review the same materials you have been working on without learning something new, you’ll start to feel bored and complacent. Soon afterward you will have a natural desire to skip a day or two, and before you know it, you are sliding backward instead of “maintaining.” In this example, we can see that one key to consistent motivation is continued forward motion, not maintenance. Maintenance quickly becomes boredom and boredom will lead to deterioration.

If you think of these two examples in a broader context, I’m sure you will find other ways they apply to your life. If you don’t continue to put energy into a relationship with your significant other, you will fall out of love. If you don’t have a new level at work to aspire to, you will want to switch careers. With these three discoveries in mind let’s continue our process of goal setting and assessment.