You've all heard that  "Practice makes Perfect". But does it
REALLY?

If you're like me, you've probably heard this so often that you
probably don't even question it. For a long time, I never thought
that quicker successes might be found by other means.

So, like a good lemming, I spent long hours at the grindstone
hoping somehow my dedicated hours to rehearsal would have me
leapfrogging from student to master.

But, the more I did it, the more it seemed I was forever doomed
to chasing the carrot with that kind of thinking - always behind,
always just not enough.

Like most, I believed the key to mastery would be given only to
those who worked the hardest and the longest. You've probably
heard the old line..."How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" -
"Practice, practice, practice".

Well that may be true in a sense. I did get better in everything
with more practice. A Lot better over a long time with dogged
determination.

But, there were also years of frustration because doing what
masters do doesn't necessarily bring you to mastery yourself
quicker.

Why? Because you don't truly "own" your actions - and if they
don't fit your body and your way of thinking, then practicing
actions that you don't really own harder and longer quite often
just leads to frustration and muscular tension.

You can't just make clothes fit if they're the wrong size - no
matter how much you want them.

It took me a long time to realize that my teachers were usually
giving me the movements that fit their body, their weight
distribution, their physical talents, and those physical
advantages that usually didn't correspond with mine.

So, in order to leapfrog out of Studentdom the way I wanted to, I
finally came to that I'd have to change my thinking more so than
trying to make someone else's way of moving my own.

From this point, it became one of my biggest goals to learn ways
of thinking that would immediately put me in the drivers' seat of
my actions. This would allow me to "own my movements", so that
physical expressions were original instead of copies of someone
else, so that I would have laser like connection from my brain to
my body, and I could be "in the moment" instead of wondering if I
was doing exactly what I was taught.

You will start leapfrogging instead of plodding along with small
steps when you begin thinking with new ways of thinking that
allow you to master your physical world rather than practicing
relentlessly hoping physical things will one day reveal wisdom
and mastery.

I will always remember one of my Mother's favorite sayings was "Life is
like a piano - What you get out of it depends on how you play it." This
is very relevant to music, life, and fitness.

In fact, when she passed away many years ago, I found this saying on a
card in her wallet. She was not only a piano teacher but a "life
teacher" as I like to say. Many came to her with bad attitudes, bad
homes, and some of the lousiest parents you can imagine. But, in spite
of that, she was always able to finally get through to her students -
to speak to their hearts and their Inner Giant.

Over the course of years, I saw the bad eggs turn into real gems. I
know, because I saw it happening as I grew up with these children all
around me. They quite often went from hating life, piano lessons,
school, and just about everything - to quite often becoming model
students and extraordinary human beings as adults.

Yes, my Mother was a great teacher, but she also had methods that were
simply applied week after week and year after year - constant tweaking
until she got the child humming at A-440hz (frequency of 440 cycles per
second) which is musician's lingo for - perfect tuning. She was a piano
tuner in a sense as well. She knew that with constant work and care,
she could finally get all the myriad of vibrational frequencies of a
student to finally harmonize, turning chaos into music.

Contrary to what most people think, a piano needs to be tuned every
couple months - if not more. The goal is to keep it in perfect tune -
at A-440hz. One single note can have 3 strings dedicated to it. And, if
you look inside a piano, you'll see it has a LOT of strings, hundreds,
in fact, to tune, with individual pitches that must all vibrate in
perfect unison to create palatable and beautiful music.

Pitch is the perceived fundamental frequency of a sound. Some strings
on a grand piano support 3000 pounds of pressure per square inch.
That's why there's a metal framework inside a piano - to hold that
tremendous amount of pressure. When a string like that snaps, it's
wickedly loud and can scare the daylights out of you.

A tuner is something of a magician who has to make thousands of minute
subtle adjustments that are necessary to put a piano in "perfect tune".
A good tuner will take hours adjusting frequencies with a highly
trained ear (and sometimes computers) - so that when a note is played,
it will vibrate perfectly - in unison with it's mates AND eventually
with the frequencies of all the other strings so that they will create
beautiful music to the ear.