Am I Practising Right? 2) How Good Is Good Enough?

How do you measure good?

I remember a time, 2 years or so ago, when I was living in the loft of my house, trying to learn the head for “Donna Lee” on bass guitar, after falling in love with Jaco Pastorius’ version. I thought that once I could play that along with his recording from his eponymous first album, I’d be ‘good’. I played it day and night, working out the most efficient way of moving my fingers around the fret board, listening to the recording to get the phrasing just so. Laying back the bits that should be laid back, and rushing the rushed bits.

To this day, I still can't play it as fast as he does on that recording, because after a while, I realised I didn't care deeply enough about that, I just wanted to learn it 'well enough for me'. The journey I went through to learn it as well as I did, even if I can't play it along yet, was worth every second. I vastly improved my bass technique, which meant that practising scales and other rudiments became a lot more fun and less painful. I noticed that whenever I soloed on a song I would include licks that had become ingrained into my subconcious from 'Donna Lee'. And do I care that I can't play along yet? Nope.

At that time in my life, roughly 2 years ago, learning it perfectly would have meant I was ‘good’. Do I consider myself ‘good’ now, even though I can't quite do it? Well, yes, but, now ‘good’ means something else to me, and at this moment ‘good’ is Pat Metheny’s song “Unquity Road” from his Bright Size Life album. Once I can play that, 'good' will change again. And this is good, this is healthy.

Accept that no matter how ‘good’ you get, you’ll always want to be better, and that you’ll always keep getting better, so long as you have something to aim for. The destination doesn't matter, but what you learn on the way does.

I was once very into the raw food movement, and a particular favourite person of mine was David Wolfe. In his book, The Sunfood Diet Success System, the first chapter was nothing about food. It was about goals. His advice was to write down 100 goals. ‘Have so many goals that you can never achieve them all, and every time you achieve one, think of another”. I didn’t get it at first, but after going through it a few times, I loved it. I’ve shared that with a lot of people since I read it. Common responses are: “What’s the point if you’re never going to finish them?”, “That’s okay, but I’m just not really a goal orientated person.” And my personal favourite “That’s easy for him to say, he’s rich”.

My attitude is that you're always 'good' enough, and you'll always get better. The reason for that being 'good' is going to change. And evolve. It has to. Imagine if it didn't. Suddenly one day you're playing guitar and you realise that you're brilliant. You'll never be any better. So you just stop playing. Ewwwww.

You can always be better. Isn't that beautiful?