Gregg Goodhart - The Learning Coach

What's something you didn't enjoy until you got good at it?

Getting good is what makes it fun. The enjoyment lives on the far side of the hard part, and once you're there it pulls you back for more.

Think of a performance that stuck with you. Is it the whole thing you remember, or one moment and the way it ended?

Daniel Kahneman called it the peak-end rule, and audiences remember a performance the same way: your best moment, and how you finish.

What piece are you breaking into small sections right now, waiting for it to turn back into music?

Pro move: practice the sections in random order. Harder now, far stronger on stage.

When did you last play all the way through without stopping to fix a thing?

We don't practice performing. We practice playing through with an escape hatch: catch the slip, fix it, keep going.

If you've ever recorded a single cold take and made yourself watch it back, how did it help your practice? What did you take away?

Getting information into your head is easy. Getting it back out under pressure, with no second chance, is the part almost no one trains.

Try this now: warm up like it's showtime, then play it through once on camera. Whatever comes out is your real level.

Practice can feel unpleasant at the start. Push past that and fluency shows up, and with it enthusiasm, self-esteem, and the want to keep going. Flow follows.

One of my students said it best: knowing how to do something makes it fun. Does this sound familiar? Share your experience with us.

Life gets pretty hard very fast if we can't make ourselves do what we don't feel like doing.

We can thank (or blame) our prefrontal cortex for our focus and self-control, or lack thereof. And it works like the rest of the cortex: you can build the skill and strengthen it through repetition.

The focus you build practicing music carries straight into academics and everything else you learn. Where has built-up focus surprised you? Share your story with us!

It's more than likely you've heard that listening to Mozart "makes you smarter".

A study from the 1990's said scores rose after listening before a math test. The study was flawed and limited. That version was never true. The real science is better: focused training in the arts strengthens the brain's attention system (Posner, Dana Foundation).

Did you believe the Mozart effect too? What other learning myths have you come across?

What were you working on the last time you found your flow and lost track of time?

That's flow. Your brain fully engaged in a problem, and the best place it can be.

The real fun of learning comes from getting good enough that the work pulls you in.

There are no B+s in music.

Picture a performance that was 11% mistakes. In a 90-minute concert that is ten minutes of things going wrong.

In most subjects we call that error rate excellent. In music, that would be a disaster.