'Shedding

'Shedding is woodshedding, the kind of lengthy and obsessive practice that musicians put in to get where they have to be.

I don't want to be the kind of motivational speaker who inspires a crowd to believe in itself and then disappears. Once the excitement of the inspirational speech fades, the audience is pretty much where it was before. Motivation is more in the daily grind of the woodshed more than in the single flashy performance. Academia is a brutally competitive profession, where enormous effort goes in to just getting the kind of job where scholarly writing is even possible. Don't "believe in yourself" in some abstract and meaningless way. Believe in the power of the shed.

Anyway, Modern Drummer magazine has regular a feature on drummers' sheds, their practice spaces. I'm not one who depends over much on having very well-appointed spaces, but the optimal organization of space and working materials can really make a difference for a lot of people. I think time takes precedence over space, because if you can allot a small amount of time to organize your work space and voilà.


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Thomas in the post directly below talks about the relation of time, space, and stupidity. He really gets the principles I am outlining in this blog and makes direct use of them in his own writing and his coaching of other peoples' work. I have learned a lot from him and I think you will too.