Do It Everyday...

I will let you in on a little secret to success: do it everyday. Now that I have piqued your curiosity and to help the half of you with your minds in the gutter, I am speaking in very general terms. It is my observation that the people who are most successful practice their skill or craft everyday.

I once saw a t-shirt that said "When I skip one day of practice, I know. When I skip two days, my stand partner knows. When I skip three days everyone knows." Personally, I find that I play clarinet as well as run at my best around the ten-day mark and, conversely, I feel my worst after three or more days away. There are plenty of studies, I'm sure, to back me up on this but I don't need to read them to know what works for me. After two or three days "out of the saddle," I feel clumsy and slightly out of step.

Fortunately, this need not be a permanent state of affairs. After a certain time being involved with either a sport or art, it quickly returns to its former state of ease. In my specific case, I start feeling 'normal' in about two to three days. I also find the opposite of this to be true. If I have a run of several big days, I feel particularly empowered. It is almost as though the muscles fall back into an effortless state of movement. The downside of this is that my endurance is a little more limited in this state. A few years ago, I ran a 50 mile race. I ran it hard, placed pretty well and felt pretty cooked afterwards. The next day, I ran for one hour. That hour started pretty rough but after five minutes of gutting it out, my body remembered the state of flow and my pace escalated with the effort remaining fairly constant. It was really a remarkable run. I have experienced the same thing after a days with clarinet practice totaling over 5 hours. The downside of this is that the day after the 50 miler, going much more than an hour would have required a rather large effort. The same is true for the 5+ hour practice day. I could be an animal for a brief period but lose intensity after an hour. Two days later, I usually am back to feeling like myself again and ready to build on the base I laid in the previous days.

The moral of this story is that you can feel tremendous just by keeping a consistent diet of work related to your goals. To be clear, I am not abdicating workaholism or over working. I am also not saying to never take a day off. Frankly, I think a day's step backwards and somewhere between six and thirteen days' steps forward are a successful formula with sound roots in both periodized training as well as scripture. It keeps you humble, too. I am, however, encouraging you to go after your goals with passion and, most of all, consistency. You probably will not achieve your dreams in a day (and if you could, would they really mean anything?) but with a consistent effort spread over a week to fourteen days you will make significant progress towards them. If you add those weeks into months and months into years, success becomes, as Kal Opperman told Richard Stoltzman, just a matter of time. If it matters to you, do it everyday.