The Three Enemies of Mastery

All right, testing. There we go. Now I have sound. Perfect. All right, so I'm going to start this from the beginning, since I didn't have sound on that last live. So I'll start from the top, which is. Welcome, everyone. Hello. Lauren Bateman. Here. It is the end of summer. It is the end of summer, and this is the time of year where we start getting back into.

Learning. You know, we've taken the summer off. Some of us have dropped our practice routine a bit because, you know, it is. It is summer and it's over, and we are all getting back into the routine of. Of practicing again. You know, I take. I take time off over the summer myself because, you know, it's a lot of work being a content creator, doing the YouTube thing. So I usually take the month of August off myself. I don't want to be inside practicing my guitar, right. I want to be outside enjoying life, enjoying the nice weather, because it gets cold and kind of balmy here in the winter. So you want to enjoy those good days, want to get outside, play some racquetball, you know, with the guys at the court. And today I've been reading this great book. It's called Mastery. Let me pick it up, because I put it on the floor. So I've been reading this great book, all right. It's called Mastery. It's an older book. It's by George Leonard, Mastery. And I have pinned my affiliate link into the description below and to the chat, if you want to grab this book. It's a nice, simple book, which I like that. Nice and thin. Okay. And I see people are hopping on again. So let me know where you're calling in from now that I can say hello to you and you can hear me this time. Hello, Jerry from Dublin. I was saying, jerry, I'm going to be in Ireland next year. Next year I'm going to Ireland. So, great book. It's called Mastery. It's by George Leonard. One of my teachers was talking about it at my event. So we have my live event here in. In Boston a couple weeks ago. We had 50 guitar people come out and have fun with us. And so I've been reading this book, and he. He talks about it in light of aikido, which is a martial arts, but he does talk about learning an instrument in here. And it's just talking about mastery in general. When we want to learn something, what gets in the way of mastery? Okay. What is mastery? Exactly? So really great book. I pinned a link to the chat if you want to go and Grab it. We got Don from California, Joseph from Tennessee. Hello. Oklahoma's in the house. We got Canada in the house. Hello, Dan. How are you doing? Acoustic Mike. Good afternoon from the uk. Love my friends over in the uk. Hey, Rob. Hey, Charles. Nice seeing you all. South Carolina in the house. So I, what I did, I took some notes. Okay. So I'm going to share some of the things that I'm learning in this book. As you can see, I haven't quite finished. So I'm. I'm very add. So, you know, this is why I like that this is a small book. Because I'm one of those people, I can only read one or two chapters at a time. I start getting bored because could you imagine, I don't like to sit still very often. If you can imagine that people who've met me in person know why I'm a very high energy person. So New Zealand. I see New Zealand. Switzerland. I really want to go to Switzerland. That's also on our list to do. Hello, Israel, how you're doing? Hello. Hello, everyone from all over the world. Isn't this great? That's why I go live. And Glenn, you're in Saugus. My school's in Lynn. I have a school right on the Lynn Saugus line. Awesome. On Walnut Street. You should pop in. So we're gonna talk about the three enemies of mastery today. Okay, Three enemies of Mastery. He starts the book off with this. So these are the three kind of personality types when you're learning something. Okay. When we're learning something new. And, and I can see myself in these and I can see my students in them as well. So the three different personality types that kind of get in the way of us learning something because, you know, mastery. Let's just talk about mastery itself. Mastery takes time. All right, Some of you have seen my video called Embrace the Suck. And if you haven't, just search Lauren Bateman Embrace the suck on YouTube and you can go watch that. But as beginners, we all have to understand that in the beginning we're not going to be very good. Okay? It's going to be awkward. We're learning new skills. So. So we're not going to be masters. Masters takes a lot of time. I'm going to pull my little diner mug over here, get some more morning coffee. Although my coffee is mostly milk, I don't do a full cup of coffee. That would be too much caffeine for me. So he talks about the dabbler, the obsessive, and the hacker. All right. And we're going to go through the three of these and as I'm going through, if you find yourself, you know, relating to one of these, just put it in the chat. Which one? Hello. Dawn from New Jersey, Wales, uk. I was in Wales back in May, so. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. I loved whales. The dabbler. Let's start off with the dabbler. Okay? So if you, if you, if this resonates with you, just type the dabbler in the chat, okay. Just so you can see how many other people relate to this. So the dabbler. I, I can relate a lot to the dabbler. Dabblers love the high that comes from doing something new. New jobs, new hobbies, new relationships. But the moment the dabbler hits a plateau, especially if it causes them to lose some of the progress they initially made, they quit. Okay, so the dabbler in a nutshell, they start something new, all right? They experience the highs that come with quick results, they get that buzz, they hit a plateau and create an excuse to quit and move on to the next thing. So obviously they never master anything because, you know, they do something we call this like the 90 day high. And you see this in the fitness world too, where people, you know, everyone's got their gym membership in January and by the time the end of February rolls around, everyone's out of the gym. Yeah. Is the dabbler someone who is short attention span? Yeah, yeah. I mean, essentially. I mean, I wouldn't equate it to like add, but they just love new things. There's excitement when we do something new. You know, my seven level system, one of the first things I teach people, we learn a couple chords, some strumming patterns, and I basically teach you how to play Horse with no Name in the first level of the course. This way you get that win and you get that excitement and people get excited like, yeah, I can play this song and I can, I can, you know, people recognize when I'm playing and that's an exciting thing and people get that, you know, kind of get that high off of that excitement. But as they go through, they realize that it takes, you know, it takes a lot more time. They start learning more chords and having to do different chord changes and it's hard to do that. That's me. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Thank you. You're welcome. All the guitar professionals, thank you. Appreciate that. But no, they're just someone who loves doing new things and I love doing new things and you know, I can relate with, with racquetball. So when I never played any type of racket sport. Okay? I played baseball, did softball, I did track and field, I did rugby, I did basketball, soccer. Those were kind of like my sports. I had never done anything with a racket. Badminton, you know, ping pong, nothing with a paddle. And the first time I played racquetball, you know, there's a big wall. It's almost like squash. And. And the number of times I hit the ball over the wall and that I had to go, it was like I was hitting the ball out of the court because we played outside. And it was frustrating. I'm like, this sucks. Like, it was fun, it was new. But I'm like, this sucks because I couldn't. I couldn't hit the wall. It was actually hitting the ball over the wall. So for some people, that gets so frustrating that they're like, this isn't fun anymore. I'm going to move on to the next thing. That gets me excited again. So they learn a bunch of new things, but they never really master anything because they give up too quickly. The next one is the obsessive. All they care about is results, results, results, and fast. Okay, so these are. I would. I would describe this more as like, kind of like your type A personalities. Like, they want everything to be perfect, and they want it to be done as quick, quickly as possible. So when they hit plateaus, they're just as appalled as the dabbler. But rather than quitting, they double down. Okay. They ignore the fact that mastery takes a step, sustained effort over time. So the obsessive, in a nutshell, they experience an upward curve. They hit a plateau. Okay, so plateaus are those flat points in learning where sometimes you don't see a lot of progress very quickly. Sometimes you might even go backwards a little bit, and they get impatient. They try to push past. Like, I'm just going to really. It's like those chord changes, I'm just going to push into this. I'm going to push it and try to move on to the next level. Then they run out of gas and experience a sharp downward decline. And again, no mastery. So let's use chord changes, because I know that's something with obsessives that, you know, they. They're trying to do these chord changes and they can't get them to go fast enough. All right, if. If you're one of those people, like, you're working on the chord changes, like, I can't get these to go any faster. I'm trying. And like, you push it, and you push it and the thing is, that doesn't happen in a week. It doesn't happen in two weeks, it doesn't happen in three weeks. We call that a plateau. That's a plateau of learning where you get excited, you get this upward curve. So it kind of looks like this. Let me make a little diagram. So this is learning. Okay.

I don't know if you guys can. Can see that with my lighting. There it is. So we got this upward curve here, and then there's a plateau where we have to stick with something for a certain amount of time before the curve starts going again. All right, so this. This is kind of what learning looks like. Okay, you make some progress. Whoops. Here you have a plateau, you make some more progress, you hit another plateau, and that's learning. And sometimes you go backwards on the plateau a little bit, and that's frustrating. That's particularly frustrating for the obsessive because they want to always be going forward, always be making progress. And sometimes with these plateaus, you have to sit. This is where we talk about fundamentals. Oh, no. Two personality disorders.

That's funny. I like that. So we have to sit in these plateaus and we have to learn. And like I said, in the seven level, I talk about the three. The three foundations of learning. And that's what, you know, that's what mastery is about. It's about doing the foundations and sitting in the foundations over and over and over again. So I talk about the three chords, you know, learning chords and getting those chord changes going, which means we have to work on finger dexterity. Okay? If your fingers are not quick, if they're not nimble, you are not going to be able to play the guitar. So we have to work on finger dexterity, we have to work on chord changes, and we have to work on strumming. Because if you can get your fingers moving, you can play chords. And if you can play chords and put a strumming pattern underneath it, you can play a song. Those literally are the three fundamentals of just learning to play guitar. There's other things. There's music theory, there's scales, you know, there's bar chords. There's all these other things. But if you just focus in the beginning on these three, and that's what we focus on in the. My seven level guitar system. You focus on these three, you will get better. But it does take time. All right, the third. The third borderline personality disorder. I like that. The person personality. We'll call them the personality disorders of learning. This one's called the Hacker, all right? And it's a bit different. Hackers begin reasonably well and make decent progress, but at a certain point, they stop caring. Okay? Once they've learned enough to feel comfortable with their situation, they stop trying to improve. All right? Hackers are happy with the status quo. Sometimes they still don't even realize they've put themselves in cruise control. Okay? So hackers, in a nutshell, just always hack away at things without working to improve their skills and grow beyond the basics. So, you know, these are people who pick up a guitar and, you know, they can play some chords, they can do some strumming patterns, and that's it. They get stuck playing the same strumming patterns over and over again. They keep using the same four or five chords over and over again, and they never challenge themselves to. To get out of their comfort zone. And he calls that the edge. In the book, where you're. You're pushing yourself beyond what you know, you're pushing even. Even the masters, like, even like myself, someone who's been playing guitar for a very long time, you're always trying to push the envelope of how far you can take things, how far can you go with this? Okay? And that's what a real master does. The master keeps sitting in that plateau and enjoys it and really enjoys it. And this is sometimes with learning, I do another little curve for you guys, just so you see it. So usually this is what learning looks like. All right? And I'm gonna.

Okay, just so you can get an idea for how this goes over time, this is what mastery looks like. Okay? Mastery looks like this. This is you in the beginning, and you get a quick win. Okay? You hit a plateau, it doesn't last very long. You get another win, you hit a plateau, lasts a little longer. Hit another plateau. And you'll notice as you go down, these plateaus get longer. Okay. The further you go down the path of mastery. Ciao. From Italia. That's where my grandfather's from. As you go down.

Mastery, these plateaus get longer. It makes it challenging. That's why, you know, and he talks about in the book with. With black belts. That's why there's so few black belts in karate. I did kempo for a number of years, and again, I didn't get to black belt. I stopped at brown because I went to. I went off to college and I stopped at brown belt. And, you know, to go from brown belt to black belt, I think it's a one to two year process. Okay? To go from a brown belt to black belt now, to go from white belt to brown belt, I think was also a. So I started. I was six, just had gotten over my cancer. So I think I was 16 when I started in Kenpo. And then I think it took me. It took me three or four years to go to a brown belt, Three or four years to go to a brown belt, and it's going to take another two years. One to two years. You just get your black belt. So you can see, you know, to go from white belt to yellow belt probably takes you about two or three months. Okay? You get that, that win because they know, you know, I think martial artists know this. They know that there's the hacker, the obsessive, and the dabbler, okay? They know those dabblers need those wins. So going to go from a white belt to yellow belt takes about three months. And then to go from a yellow belt to an orange belt maybe is another three to four months. Then from orange belt, I think the next one after that, you know, was a purple belt. Okay, so go to orange, purple. Now it's taking you six to eight months. So the timeline got longer than from purple to green. Maybe it takes you a year. And then from green to brown, maybe it's a year, year and a half. Brown to black, another year and a half. So as you go up the. The mastery ladder, you have to sit in the fundamentals a lot longer. And what you learn is you learn to enjoy. It's almost meditative, okay? So people, you know, we talk about scales and stuff with guitar, but even something as simple as a spider exercise, okay, Spider exercise is something I teach students in either level one or level two of the seven level system. It's just a finger exercise to get your fingers moving. Okay? You could work on the spider exercise even as a black belt and learn from it. And that's the difference, you know, white belt, someone in the beginner level learn it's a spider exercise. And they just kind of rush through it. I did it. Cool. What's next? And it's like, no, no, no, no, no. I did a video, I think it was a couple weeks ago that came out. The five mistakes that you make when you're practicing the spider exercise. And one of the big mistakes is people do not practice it for long enough. They do not master that exercise. Okay? They practice it for one or two weeks, and they're like, I got it. That's good. Even though the notes aren't clean, even though their fingers are still flying off the fretboard, even though it's not relaxed. Because relaxation and speed come from experience, okay? Speed comes from being relaxed. If you want to go faster, you have to relaxed. You can't go fast when you're tense. It just. It doesn't work, all right? It's like punching through, you know, quicksand or wet concrete, okay? You can't do it, but if you relax, you go faster and relaxation starts sitting in with experience. Experience is that mastery journey. Okay? So if you are learning the guitar, if you're just starting, you know, don't be a dabbler, an obsessor or a hacker. Don't be one of these people. Understand that the, oh, I did it upside down. This is your journey, okay? This is your guitar journey. And it gets, unfortunately, longer and harder to see progress the further you go. But what I tell my students to do in my seven level system, I say record yourself. If you have not done so yet, I highly recommend record yourself playing something at the level you're at right now. Where are you today? All right? And I tell students, film yourself playing your spider exercise, okay? Or film yourself playing your first song. And don't do it to perfection. Don't try. Just play it. Film yourself where you're at right now and save it so that three months down the road, when you hit that plateau, you can go back and remember where you were three months ago. Because it's so hard to remember where we came from when we're sitting in the moment now. Okay, so someone asked a question over here. Is that the 15 minute exercise? Will that help me? Yes. So the spider exercise, let's just take that for example. I got a guitar right here. I always have a guitar. We got the new PRs hanging up over here.

You know, we take a spider exercise. Okay.

Okay. And you go through it and you're. You know, most people, they start like this.

And they're like, great. And usually the fingers are doing this, and, you know, it's crazy. And maybe, maybe if they practice a lot in a couple weeks, their spider exercise looks more like this. You know, maybe the notes are getting better, but the fingers, you know, sometimes you hit the wrong string and most people move on at that point and it's like, no, no, no, no, no. Slow it down. You can practice this for 15 minutes. Are you relaxing your fingers? Right? And then once you get to the point where you're like, I can go fast and I can play notes cleanly, can you start stretching it out? Can you start moving it?

Can you go forwards? Can you go backwards? Can you Go diagonal down the strings. Look, even I need to practice that. But it's. But you can see, I've been playing guitar for how long? I've actually never done that before. And I'm like, cool. That might actually be something for me to work on. Just going diagonally down the frets and then coming up diagonally.

Okay, so there you go. So see, I just took something from. Which is beginner, which you kind of playing the spider exercise like this, it sounds like crap in the beginning. The first time you do it, you feel awkward as hell. Your hand feels like it has a mind of its own. And you're like, this is not going to help me play guitar. You're like, this doesn't sound like music at all. So if you are the dabbler, you're like, this is not fun. I quit, okay? Which is why I always emphasize trying to find the fun things as quickly as possible in your playing. Because the fun is why you learn guitar. Okay? Because I get a lot of students in my course, and sometimes they're so focused on these skills, they're so like, I'm focused on getting this perfect and getting this right. I've been in your system three or four months, and I haven't learned a song yet. And I'm like, what are you doing? Learn a song that's fun. Why did you start learning the guitar? To have fun. So, you know, no offense. This is a great foundational exercise. You need to sit in this to help it, you know, learn guitar. It's part of your mastery journey. But this is the fun part.

That's the fun part. Do that, too. Save it at the end of the practice, because you always want to work on those fundamentals first, and then save for the fun at the end of your practice, because that's what makes you come back to practicing is the fun. Okay? So if you're not having fun, you're gonna quit, and you're gonna put the guitar back in the basement, back in the attic, or back in the closet, wherever your guitar was hiding, and you're gonna put it back. And then three years later, you're gonna say, maybe I'll try it again. Okay, I. I learned guitar on and off. I tell people. I'm like, your. Your journey in my journey are probably very similar. One I don't have a degree in music for. So for those of you who think I know, I live in Boston. I didn't go to Berkeley. I went to Boston University. My degrees are in archaeology and biology. Nowhere in there is guitar I didn't even take a guitar class. I almost took. Took a guitar class as like a PE class, but I didn't. Okay. So I, I don't have a music background. No one in my family plays a musical instrument, so I don't have natural talent. Okay. So our journeys are very similar. You know, we didn't have a lot of money or, you know, my grandfather used to pay for my piano lessons and I didn't like the piano for. For re. Some of the reasons, you know, because I'm a dabbler a bit. But I did take lessons for. For three years. I did take piano lessons. It was torture. I hated it. I didn't understand the instrument. And so when my sister got me a guitar when I was 16, she, my mom, you know, we're not going to pay for guitar lessons. One, we couldn't afford them and two, I wasted the piano lessons. So I was just going to waste the guitar. Just the way I wasted the piano lessons. Just the way I wasted the, the art lessons. Just the way I wasted. Can you see the dabbler in me? Like, we did this and we quit. We did this and we quit again. I did things for, you know, I didn't do things for three months and then stop. I usually did them for two or three years and then I went on to something else. Guitar and music was the only thing that really, really stuck with me in martial arts. I did, I love martial arts. I took boxing in college. I was an amateur boxer. I did some fights, decided I liked my face and my nose just the way it was. So I stopped before I broke my nose or anything. So. But I did do boxing. I loved it. I love sp. Those are the things that I really did stick with a long time for mastery. But guitar was the only thing outside of athletics that really, really stuck with me. Yes, Very good life Choice.

Oh, another YouTuber, Alan Robinson, was a martial artist too. Okay, fantastic. Yeah, I think, you know, I think a lot of us probably took martial arts when we were younger. I always compare learning the guitar to martial arts and I think that's why I like this mastery book. So again, the book I'm talking about, if you didn't see this earlier on, it's Mastery by George Leonard. It's the author of the Way of Aikido. He talks a lot about, he makes a lot of references to aikido, but it's a very good book. I did pin a link in the chat if you want to go grab that. That is an affiliate link on Amazon So if you go buy it, I might make 10 cents. But it's just a way for you to find this book easily. I also put a link in the description below. Really, really great book. Thin, easy read for me because like I said, I am a dabbler. So I get bored. I get bored very easily. So I can only read one or two chapters of a book at a time, and then I have to. I have to put it down. It was so funny. We were. I was outside in the yard the other day and we were reading. My wife and I were out in the yard in our chair. She was reading her book. You know, she reads like Jane Austen and nice things. I'm reading this, and we're out there for maybe 10 or 15 minutes. I put the book down. She goes, oh, did you finish your book? I said, no, I'm starting to get bo.

So that's me. I. I can only read in. In short sections because my attention span is not that good. Guitar, now guitar. I could sit and play for an hour and be totally fine. But. But reading is. Is a very, very hard thing for me. Spider pick down and going down. Need to pick up. Yeah. So with the spider exercise, just going back to that, because it's. Again, it's probably one of the most basic exercises you can do on guitar. But the thing is, if you. If you take this mastery path, okay, you look at this and you take that spider exercise and you work it on a path of mastery. You know, when you first. When I first teach people the spider exercise, it's all down picks. Okay? All down picks.

Okay. All down picks. Then to go faster, we would do alternate picking.

Down, up, down, up. And see the me. Because I haven't practiced this in a while. I can feel. I can feel myself tensing up at that speed. So if I wanted to. When I was, you know, taking electric guitar lessons, the person I worked with, we had drills. All we would do is drill spider exercise. So when I show you spider exercise, you know, it's just 1, 2, 3, 4. Okay? And he had me do it in every single combination you could imagine. And we'd have to move it up and down the fretboard. So we would do 1, 2, 3, 4. Then we would do 1, 2, 4, 3, 1, 3, 2, 4. 1, 4, 2, 3, 1, 4, 3, 2. Every single. And I'd have to go all the way down, all the way back up, shift all the way down. I'd have to do it three times in a row. And the goal was to do every single combination you could 2, 3, 4, 1. You know, 2, 3, 1, 4, 2, 4, 1, 3. It was to do every single combination. I feel like there were like 16 to 20 of these combinations, and I had to get them all to 100 beats per minute on 16th notes. So basically 400 beats per minute. So if you want to know how fast that is. But I did that. It took me months. It took me months to do this, and I eventually was able to get all of the combinations at that speed. Speed. But let's just do 100 beats per minute just so you can hear how quickly, how quick that is. And there's people who play at a thousand beats per. Like, there's some. Your shredders, like, they're really, really fast. I. I'm not a fast guitar player. I never worked on mastering that skill. All right, so this is 100 beats per minute. 1, 2, 3, 4. So is this 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 1 E and A. 2 E and A 3 E and A 4 E and A.

So you had to do. And you can see it's a little sloppy because I haven't practiced at that speed. And if I sat down for a week, I could probably clean it up and get it going again. Okay. So it just goes to show you, if you don't practice things, you can slide backwards too, but that's it. So it's like 1E and A, 2E and A 3E and A 4E and O. And you have to work on not only relaxing the fretting hand, you have to work on relaxing the picking hand, too. So we were focusing a lot on. On picking technique, which I had never done, because I'm mostly a strumming. You know, I'm mostly a strumming player. And I would have to do all these different combinations at that speed. Okay. And again, we would check them off. And once I hit it, I didn't have to practice it again, but it really made my hands super flexible. And all it is is a spider exercise. So, you know, I've been playing the guitar for probably 10 or 15 years at that point, and I was still practicing a spider exercise. Okay. And I just showed you. So, see, I'm. You know, I'm not afraid to come live and show you that I can't play something that's something. I would have to go back. If I wanted to get that speed again, I'd have to go back. I'd have to sit down with my net metronome, and I'd have to work on building that speed back up, okay? Because it's not something I've practiced in years. So I've slowed down. Maybe I could do it 80 or 90% of what I could, but I can't do it at 100%. And that would require me sitting down, putting the time in and going back. And that might take a week, it might take two weeks, it might take a month. Now, here's the cool thing about mastery and learning something. It's like riding a bike. So I've done all those finger exercises already, so it's probably not going to take me six months like it did the first time to get everything up to speed. I could probably get everything back up to speed maybe in one to two months. Okay? So every time you do something, because I have a number of guitar students who.

You know, have come to the guitar, they've walked away, they come back, they walk away, they come back, they walk away. They're the dabbler. They get excited, they quit. They get excited, they quit. They get excited, they quit. All right? And you know, we've got that. But every time you come back, you get better because you still have some muscle memory, all right? So every time you come back, it will go faster. It will go faster. But that is the key to mastery, my friends. The key to mastery is understanding that you are going to stink in the beginning. That's number one. We're all going to stink. That spider exercise, I mean, you're probably like, wow, that was pretty quick. But for me, it was messy, it was sloppy, it was tense. So there's a lot I have to work on. And that's just a spider exercise. And I've been playing guitar for 20 years and I'm like, up. Gotta go back to basics. I have to go back to basics if I want to master that skill again. If I want to get back there and I want to be able to play with faster fingers, I have to go back and have to learn how to relax on a basic skill. Like a spider exercise. Very basic skill. And that's the difference between the white belts and the black belts. The black belts will sit on that spider exercise for a year and love it. That's the difference a beginner learns. The spider exercise. They sit on it for two to four weeks and they're like, great. What's next? And which is fine. And I talk about that in the seven level. You know, I'm like, you should. We're not working on mastery in my seven level guitar system. Like, I tell people my. We're going, we're kind of going through the motions. Okay. We're getting you through the mechanics of learning a new exercise. And that can be awkward. You know, strumming if you've never stumbled before is awkward. If you've never played a C chord before, it's awkward. Right? So what we're working towards is getting the mechanics, getting the basics down. So by the time you get through the seven level system, you're probably like an orange belt. Okay. You're probably an orange belt in the grand scheme of things. Okay? So we've done white belt, yellow belt. You're an orange belt. Congratulations. Now, at the orange belt level, when you graduate and you go to purple, you go back to your white belt skills and you relearn them, and you go back to your yellow belt skills and relearn, okay? You're building upon what you've already learned, but you're going back to those fundamentals and saying, okay, now I'm seeing this through a different light. Through a different light. Oh, thank you so much. Someone just stacked. Hippie chick. I love that. Never give up and use baby steps. Thank you for your $20 donation. I appreciate that. That's so kind. Thank you. Lovely. Thank you so much. No, never give up, Never give up. And it is all about baby steps. And sometimes it's revisiting those things. So, you know, I tell students, I give them a goal of, you know, for chord changes, I'll say, you know, if you can get your C to g chord change 60 beats per minute, move on. But, yeah, now song songs are played 100 beats per minute, 120. Because I know it takes a long time to get to that point. And when you get to the seven end of the seven level, I oftentimes have students who go back to level three and work through it again. Because now you're listening and learning from a different perspective than where you were six months ago, nine months ago, a year ago. Just like that spider exercise I. I showed you, okay, There. When you learn it the first time, you get one perspective, all right? You're just trying to get it to work, all right? You're trying to get your fingers to do what you're telling them to. When you learn the spider exercise the first time, if you've never played a stringed instrument before, you feel like your hands and your fingers have a mind of their own, okay? If you have ever felt like your hands and fingers have a mind of their own, put a 1 in the chat, because I want people to know you're not alone. Peter Peter says I'm still learning and have your seven level course and some of your other courses. I just love electric guitars. I now have a large collection. Is that normal before you can play to a high standard? A lot of students have that. You know, I've got. There's so many guitars in this room. I can count one, two. There's three here. So I got one here. There's two guitars over here. Two more. So what's that? Five, six, seven, eight. I can see nine guitars at least. The ones that are out of their cases in this room with me right now. And no, I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that keeps the excitement. It's a hobby. Yeah. See, there's some ones in the chat. Lots of people that. It's a hobby, and if you love it, you start collecting. You know, it's like, not that, you know, there are collectors who collect antique cars. I don't have my Camaro. It's on the floor. Let me grab. Grab it.

Antique cars. All right, so there's car collectors who have collections of cars because they love antique cars. I love Camaros. I've collected a number of Camaros over the years. I only own two of them, but I've. I've had a number over the years. I have. I still have my 68. This one's a 69, I believe. So this is a Z 28. I don't have a Z 28, but it's a 230 straight six. Power glide transmission. But it is red. It doesn't have white stripes, but it is, you know, it's an old Camaro. It was. The first car I ever bought was my Camaro. So I have that one. And now I have the red, the ZL1. Okay. But when I started, I started with the 1968 classic, and then I graduated to a 2010, just an RS. And then I graduated to a 2019 SS and then I graduated again to a 2022 ZL1. Right. So I went from like 230 horsepower to 300 horsepower to 450 horsepower to 650 horsepower. So it's escalating. I don't know where I go from there. And I'm not getting a Yenko because those are like. I think those are like almost a thousand horsepower. I think I'm good stopping at the Z01, but you can see my progression. But you get excited about something, and when you like something. Yes. Lean into that. Because getting a new guitar is exciting. And if that Helps you practice and keep practicing. Go for it. You know, I still have my first guitar. It's hanging on the wall over here and, and I get new guitars like this. This PRS is new and I've been playing this because it's new. It's exciting. I don't particularly play a lot of electric guitar. I usually play, I've always played on my Ibanez, which is over here. So this is my, been my main electric. You guys have seen the Gretsch back there. I use that in my Blues Guitar 101 course. But I don't play the Gretch that often. I, I just like the feel of this one. But I really, I've never had a hollow body before like this. You know the, the, the Gretsch is a chambered, it's a duo jet chambered. The hollow body too. It's a different guitar and I like the sound of it. So because I've got a new guitar that's electric, I might start playing electric guitar again. Because this is a new guitar. It's kind of exciting to me. Okay, so getting new guitars is fine, but I have tons of old ones. I bought this guitar. I'm still working at the pharmaceutical company, so I'm gonna guess I bought this guitar in 2007 or 2008. So that means it's like 17 years old. Okay. And I still love it and I still play it. But now I've got a PRS and you know, I'll use that for different, different applications too. Okay. So it just goes to show you, you know. Yes. Collect them, you know, if you, if you have the money. And I, I've got all the guitars. I have these wall, you can't see it, but I have hangers on the wall so I can hooks to hang my guitars on. They're. They're works of art too. Okay. They really are. So, you know, if you love guitar and you want to collect them, go for it, go for it. But don't get to the point where you own a bunch of, you know, two thousand, three thousand dollar guitars but you can't play any of them, okay? So pick one that you love because there's always one that you like better than the rest. You're not supposed to have favorite children, but you know you got one, right? It's like I tell my nieces people like I have two nieces. And they're like, you're not supposed to play favorites. And I'm like, I know, but one of them's a jerk. And the Other one's like a sweet kid, so. But I have, you know, you have favorite guitars, and, you know, I love my Tailor. Don't get me wrong. I love my Taylor. It's a great guitar. But my Crafter is still my favorite because it's the one that I kind of grew up with, okay. That I grew up on as a guitar player. I went from being a really bad guitar player to actually becoming a. A decently good guitar player on that guitar. Okay? So it's gonna be one of my favorites. Even though the Tailor is absolutely lovely, sounds beautiful, plays beautiful, the Crafter's still my favorite. All right? And I don't know, maybe this PRS will become one of my favorite electrics, but my Ibanez is still my favorite electric to play again. I've had it for 17 years. I've bonded with it. I've played. Played live on stage with it. So, you know, there's a lot of memories that go with that guitar too. So there's. There's emotional connection to the instrument as well. So when you're on a journey, you know, if you hit this plateau and you're like, this stinks. And you've been on this plateau for three to six months, and it takes buying a new guitar to get you excited again. Go for it. Go for it. I I 100 support gas. Gas. Or is it guitar acquisition syndrome? I'm a full supporter. I don't know how it, you know, does for your marriage, but. But I'm a full supporter of if a new guitar is what inspires you. If you're in the middle of a plateau and you're like, this guitar speaks to me. I love it. I want to play it, get it. Because it can help you sometimes project out of that, Ruth. But, you know, don't become a guitar collector who doesn't play the guitar. All right? Get the guitars, play them, touch them. You know, find something that's fun, but also work on something that's challenging. So you keep working on your learning curve, because that's what mastery is. It takes time. It takes effort. We're coming back into the fall. It's Labor Day weekend here in the United States, okay? Mastery means getting on. You know, it's like they say, if you fall off the horse, get back on. We're getting back on the horse again, okay? We've all been enjoying our summers. Get back on the horse. Get back to the practice routine, okay? Start with the fundamentals. Finger dexterity. That spider exercise. You could use that as the warmup for the rest of your life. And you can keep increasing the level. You can keep changing it up. That thing can stick with you for years and you'll still be learning from it. Okay. And that again, that's the difference between a beginner and a master. The beginner will be like, I got it, let's move on. The master will be like, how can I do this different? What else can I learn from this? All right, I got the basics. What's the. What's the next step? What's the next envelope? What's the next plateau I can hit with this exercise? What's that next plateau? Okay. And sometimes it's going to take you a month to get through the plateau. Sometimes it's going to take you six months. And that's part of mastery. It just takes time. You really are a very good coach. Thank you. You're so welcome. Oh, hi, Joe. Thank you. Another $5 donation. I appreciate that. I used to play in College some 20 plus years ago and stop. Because life happens now at 48, I'm getting back into it for myself and to teach my kids. And, you know, thank you for saying that, Joe. I think that's an important part of mastery too, and it's having a good why behind why you're doing this. You know, why did you pick up the guitar? And I know earlier, you know, I said, you picked up the guitar if you want to have fun, but that's usually not why people pick up a guitar. Most people pick up a guitar for something else. Yeah. Again, good for you, Joe. Let's all give Joe a clap because he's coming back to it. You know, at 48, he's on and off for. For 20 years and coming back to it. That's not easy. It's not easy to come back to something after taking a break for a while. It's not easy at all. So, you know, having a good why behind what we're doing. I have many students have come to me and said, you know, they had a loved one pass away and they got their guitar and they want to honor that person's memory. That's a huge why. I tell this story about my event. I had a student came up to me and he's like, I'm not really practicing. Do you have any advice? And I did this with him. I said, why? You know, just tell me, why did you start playing the guitar? He's like, well, I want to. I want to play guitar for my, my granddaughter. I was like, that's a really great why. Super Fun, like imagine the memories you're going to create. So if you give up now, you're never going to create those memories that you want to create with your granddaughter. And I said, if you can't do it for yourself, do it for her. Her. And he did. He, he actually, I think he submitted a video for our last student recital. And you know, he's been playing guitar for his granddaughter. And that's what it was for. It wasn't about him. It was about the memories he could create with his family. And I think that's important for people to understand that. You need to know why you started this journey in the first place. Even if it's, I want to play like Jimi Hendrix or I want to be like Clapton, or I really want to finger pick James Taylor, I want to be like my idol. Why? Why? What is that? What is playing like James Taylor do for you? What does that do? Oh, well, you know, I think it would, you know, boost my self esteem and confidence. Cool. Why? Well, because people would like listen to me and it would make me feel good, you know, but why? I want to be a rock star. Okay, cool. You want to be a rock star, that's why. It's not because you want to learn James Taylor, you want to play guitar, feel good about yourself and be a rock star yourself. Okay. So understanding the deeper meaning behind why you're doing this, why are you practicing this instrument? Because. That's the why that's going to get you through these plateaus. When it gets hard and you're like.

You want to throw the guitar on the ground. And I've had those moments too. Trust me, when you get to that point, you have to go back to the why. Because if you want to get through this plateau, you need a really good why for why you're going to keep working through it. If not, you're just going to be a dabbler, you're going to be a hacker, or you're going to be obsessive and you're going to quit. So if there's one thing you get from this talk today, go get this book. Mastery George Leonard. Very easy read, even for someone like me who has a short attention span. George Leonard's Mastery. I pinned a link, my affiliate link for Amazon. Okay, so again, if you buy through that link, I might make 10 or 20 cents if you buy this book today. But go get this book. It's really great. I've really been enjoying it. And if you're anyone that's learning anything, it will teach you a lot about yourself and the mistakes you make when you're learning something. Okay, I don't know if you're a dabbler, an obsessive, a hacker. You might be all three at given points in your life, but he talks about how to work through this, how to love the plateau, how to work through what we call homeostasis. How we love. We hate change. As humans, we hate change, whether it's good or bad, whether changes are good or bad. Our body just likes things to be the same. So go get this book. Thank you for being here. Have a wonderful Labor Day if you're in the US And I'll see you all in a lesson video real soon. Thank you to all those who made donations and super chats. Really appreciate that you all mean the world to me. Have a wonderful, wonderful day. Practice hard. Get some mastery.