You have to practice your didgeridoo everyday.

I once tried to learn how to play the didgeridoo.  Yes I own one.  No I never learned how to play.  Why did I fail?  What went wrong?  Practice, or lack thereof is what went wrong.  I failed to practice it everyday.   Had I practiced everyday, even for just a little while, I would have eventually, perhaps years later, but eventually would have been decent at it.

This attempt at didgeridoo mastery occurred back in around 2003 or maybe even earlier…so imagine if I had only practiced one hour three times a week since then (post date is in 2014, so we will say 11 years)…3 hours / week, 52 weeks/ year, 156 hours a year for 11 years, that would be 1716 hours of practice.  I would think that you could become quite proficient at just about anything after 1700+ hours.

Now I do have one caveat with this little discussion.  Many of you have heard the term “Practice makes perfect.”   Well that is false….incorrect….just flat out wrong.  Practice doesn’t make perfect…..Practice makes PERMANENT.   If you practice perfectly, then practice will make perfect over time….but if you practice incorrectly, bad habits will form and will  be very hard to break.

So why am I writing this post?  Not to impress you with my didgeridoo mastery….but to make a point that has become clear in my mind recently.  If you’ve got a passion, something you wish you were doing, or that dream skill that you always wanted to have…..practice it.

I’ve always wanted to write, always wanted to be a writer….I need to write….write as much as possible, write as often as I can.  I should be able to put down 500-1000 words a day minimum without too much trouble.  While this post is a little short, most of my posts here average between 500-1000 words.  What if I wrote a post every day, or every other day?  How much better at writing would I become?  What if I did that every day and churned out 300,000+ words in a year?  What’s an average novel size? 100,000 words?  Just think, if I wrote every day, I could be putting out 3 novels a year.  Of course there is much more that goes into creating a novel than just writing, however, if I practice it every day….I can’t help but get better at it.

Just think too, if we would spend just a little time in prayer each day?  Or how about be like Daniel and pray 3 times a day, every day.  How much better would we be able to talk to God and to discern his voice when he speaks to us?   What if we read our Bible every day?  Just pick a couple verses to start and read every day.  How much better would we understand God’s word and understand his will?

It only took me about 15 minutes to write about 500 words in this post.  Not much time out of my day.  Time that could have been otherwise wasted.  But those 15 minutes spent each day, whether writing, whether praying, whether reading God’s word…and yes even playing the didgeridoo, add up to mastery when repeated over and over.