It’s all about the Bass (2)

Respond to your Challenges.  

I had started my new passion of playing my 5 string Overwater bass guitar in my new band.  I absolutely loved it.  I loved every minute of playing and practicing and having the opportunity to play in the band with some great musicians. 

I was learning new material every week, as I caught up with the rest of the band that had been playing together for some time.  As each week passed I discovered new ways of improving my practice time.  There are still techniques that I will need time to focus practice on to even start to play, and others were I can see some really encouraging progress, and I get to be able to play something that I had previously struggled with. 

“If you are not growing and developing yourself in the pursuit of your dream, it may be time to identify a new one. Your journey must be fulfilling.~ John Maxwell

I learned an important principle of following a dream: Is my dream inspirational, does it continue to inspire me?  In order to remain a compelling dream, it needs to stay in the Inspiration Zone.

The Inspiration Zone is found between the Comfort Zone and the Delusion Zone, and it’s where the best, most exciting and rewarding challenges are found.

The Inspiration Zone is found just beyond what’s often called the “Terror Barrier”, and before you reach the “Barmy Barrier”. 

I learned another feature of following dreams too.  Not only does it need to stay in the Inspiration Zone, it will often encounter what Seth Godin calls a Dip in his book by the same name. 

“The decision to quit or not is a simple evaluation: Is the pain of the Dip worth the benefit of the light at the end of the tunnel?”“Quitting is better than coping because quitting frees you up to excel at something else.  At the beginning, when you first start something, it’s fun. Over the next few days and weeks, the rapid learning you experience keeps you going. Whatever your new thing is, it’s easy to stay engaged in it. And then the Dip happens. The Dip is the long slog between starting and mastery. A long slog that’s actually a shortcut, because it gets you where you want to go faster than any other path.”

For me playing bass, the dips were usually found in a new song that had an impossible bass line.  How anyone could play it at all was a total mystery.  However, with some dedicated listening to figure out what was being played I started to master each of these songs in turn.  Some needed a few prompts on the practice sheet to remind me of the rhythm, while others needed to be transcribed in full so that I could practice slowly at first and then gradually speed up.  Curiously the songs that were initially the hardest to learn, became the most entrenched in my memory and easiest to remember by the time I had mastered them!

"The journey is better than the Inn."~ Miguel de Cervantes

It turns out that in the achievement of a dream it is usually the journey that has produced the most important outcome in what or who you become in the process.