Passion and Persistence

Image by woodleywonderworks

We have unwittingly had a theme in two of the last three posts on the main site:

Is my music good enough?

Never Give Up

Although the article that this post links to is about productivity (and it's very long - 6000 words or so), it's also very close to that theme we've been writing about - whether you have the passion and persistence to commit yourself to what you hope to acheive. Will you learn how to improve your material and will you keep going relentlessly?

Have you got the passion and persistence that you MUST have if you're going to get there?

I'd recommend that you find the time to read it - the central message is very well put and ought to make you consider whether you're going about your music career the right way.

Please read the whole thing here.

Here's one section that I found particularly good - I hope the author doesn't mind me clipping such a big chunk, but it ought to make you want to read the rest!:

Myelin, neurologists have recently discovered, is basically the key to all human talking, reading and learning skills. If you view every human movement or thought as an electrical impulse travelling through a circuit of neurons, then think of myelin like the insulation which wraps around these fibres and increases their signal strength. “The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our moments and thoughts become” recaps Coyle.

He then looks at research by Simon Clifford into why South America (specifically Brazil) is a hotbed for footballing talent. His findings showed that the popular way of playing football there, known as Futebol de Salão, had a big influence. The game is played on a small court and uses a ball that is half the size of a regular football yet weighs twice as much, so rarely bounces.

A study by the University of Liverpool found that Futebol de Salão players touch the ball six times more per minute than people training with a normal ball on a regular pitch. Futebol de Salão players were able to wrap their football talent circuits in more myelin over a shorter period of time. It also meant that when they played on a full-sized pitch, players felt like they had “acres of space”.

The book also highlights the story of the Brontë sisters, and their love for character creation and writing short stories as children just to keep themselves entertained. Juliet Barker, a six year curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum revealed that the sisters wrote “twenty-two little books averaging eighty pages each in one fifteen-month period”. That’s a lot of writing.

Coyle once again links this back to Myelin, noting his belief that the sisters’ talent was developed through little more than constant practice. To add even more legs to that theory, Barker says that “The first little books weren’t just amateurish – a given, since their authors were so young – they lacked any signs of incipient genius. Far from original creations, they were bald imitations of magazine articles and books of the day.”

Many of you will know that Charlotte Brontë went on to write literature classic Jane Eyre with her sister Emily producing another, Wuthering Heights.

Coyle comes to the conclusion that passion and persistence are the key ingredients of talent and success. Why? “Because wrapping myelin around a big circuit requires immense energy and time. If you don’t love it, you’ll never work hard enough to be great.”

Do go and read the whole article here.