Practice, Performance, And Attention Markets
March 2, 2026·0 comments·zg
Practicing sucks. It's choosing to do something over, and over, and over again in pursuit of some amount of improvement, all while there are so many other things you could be doing. And not even better or more productive things, just anything else except practicing for the 2nd or 15,000th time.
Understanding the distraction point, which as a person with self-diagnosed ADHD I'm going to call this out as unprofessionally as I can, is the secret to good practice.
It makes me think of the art of practice as a market.
An internal market. For attention.
Practice is an internal attention market.
At any and every point of time when you’re sitting to practice - other stuff wants your attention, and this suck-factor is the reality of what make practice, and incremental improvement, worth it.
At college we had pretty good “practice rooms” in the music building. They weren’t great. Mostly because sound bled through in some echoey cacophony of everybody else practicing.
You’d sit to practice and hear Brad shedding “Eternal Triangle" and think - I can’t do that, and sure, I'm not a jazz major either but what’s a Music Ed major going to do with chops like that when he’s in front of a bunch of middle schoolers at band practice? This whole degree is an evil plot. And who’s that that doing french horn runs that sound so impossible, or who could possibly be trying to get their wrist technique down on the xylophone in the percussion room and failing that badly - I think I could do better. How can a person focus in here?!
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