Operationalize Your Success
One question I get asked from time to time is how I maintain advancement and stay aware of it.
Well, the first thing you need to be aware of is your learning pattern. It has a plateau-like structure.
After that, it’s all about a term from empirical research: Operationalization.
Big word, simple meaning. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you wanted to measure whether carrots are good for eyesight. How would you go about it? One way would be to get a bunch of people to test, and do an eyesight test. Then feed them carrots for a week and measure again.
In effect, you’ve operationalized this experiment by developing an eyesight test that will measure only certain aspects of a persons vision.
Similarly, when practicing, measuring success is done by giving yourself variables to measure.
Here are a few such variables:
- Speed. You can measure speed with a timer. How fast can you play a piece while maintaining the same technical standard? If you can play something really nicely at 100 BPM, can you do the same at 120 without impairing a clean sound?
- Your personal judgement. Record yourself twice with an interval in between and try to criticize. This is my favorite way of measuring success as I can actually judge the overall progress just by listening to myself. If I feel I’ve worsened, I’ll go over the problems with my teacher.
- A friend. Ask an aficionado to be your critic. This way you’ll also play with a little concert pressure.
- Pain and rough skin. As a guitarist, I tend to map my progress according to the level of pain in my fingers when playing a tough technical exercise. If it gets lighter and easier to accomplish, I usually try to play it really slowly once more before upping the speed (depending on whether I’m playing for speed in the first place).
Operationalization is a tough thing for musicians, but helps to keep us motivated and gives us some structure to our walk towards mastery. What are your ideas of measuring success?
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