Practice your career like you're practicing guitar

I've been taking guitar lessons for 6 years now. Most of that time has been classical, but recently I have branched out to more jazz, blues, bluegrass and rock. During a recent lesson, I asked about how to transcribe Brandi Carlile's Before It Breaks to a fingerstyle jazz arrangement.


My teacher took a deep breath and said, "you know, when a new classical student comes to me, I see this incredibly long road ahead of them. Right hand technique, learning to read music, rhythm, barre chords, phrasing and on and on. But then we have our first lesson and start the journey. With how you're mixing it up now, I see that same long road ahead for you. Learning to write jazz arrangements, there's a lot to it. But ok, let's start the journey."

I have to say, this "cross training" has reinvigorated my guitar playing. And in a philosophical mood one night, I decided that we should all approach our careers with the same attitude as learning a musical instrument. Start - that's always the most important step! Start small - you don't have any choice, since you don't have any skill or experience. And then stretch yourself incrementally. Don't try for a grade 5 piece when you're at grade 2, but keep on upping the ante to keep you out of your comfort zone. It's the only way to grow.

There are parallels in many other areas. For example, I have been back to weightlifting for the past 6 months. What you have to do with weightlifting (if you want to progress) is start small and exercise to failure. That hurts, so it's easy to avoid and just keep on putzing around with the same weight. But if you work to failure and then add to the weight incrementally, you will make astonishing progress. I started my deadlifts at 135 pounds. Yesterday I did a number of sets at 315. I am confident that I can work my way up to 400. It will please me to be a guitar playing, chess playing, IT nerd who can repeatedly lift up 400 pounds.

But when I interview people who have "10 years of experience doing x," I often discover that they really have the same 2 years of experience 5 times over. They have learned to play guitar at an early intermediate level and decided that that's good enough. They are curling 25 pounds over and over and not caring about progress. They got their Cisco CCNA and can comfortably administer routers and switches on autopilot.

So... no! Stagnating on the plateau is death. Growing is more fun. Being able to play beautiful music is so rewarding. Being strong feels good. Growing in your career is the best of all, because that's where you spend most of your time.

The good news is you can start right now. You already lift 135 pounds. You already play Julia Florida. You already do a good job of SQL database administration. So now look. What's the next step? What, given time and energy, can you accomplish next week that you couldn't accomplish today? There's always something. Right now I've jumped into the world of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. I feel like it's a new guitar piece. I know the notes and the rhythm, I just need to practice away at this new arrangement. I know SQL, SharePoint, Exchange, .net programming. But I don't know Microsoft Dynamics very well. But soon, with diligent practice and careful attention, I'll have that skill added to my repertoire.