The Practice of Practice by trumpeter Jonathan Harnum presents a lot of quality advice for getting things done. The book is written in bite sized nibbles with a lot of puns. It’s also full of QR codes to URL-shortened links to videos and apps, which I didn’t use. I’ve been going through a relative low spot in music and this has inspired me to make more time and play more broadly.

Unsurprisingly, there is advice here relevant to work life, or life in general. Getting better at a musical instrument is not different from getting better at any large set of skills: you have to start from a truthful assessment of where you are, select the tools to improve with, do it, and reassess. The fundamental issue, and one that this book grinds on pretty hard for the first third, is a growth mindset. I was a little put off by the amount of effort put into this, but it’s fair. Any value from this book is built from the concept that improvement through work is possible, and so that idea is laid out repeatedly with stories, studies, anecdata, quotes, and anecdotes before moving on to the more practical hands on material. If you think musicality (or aptitude for software) comes from naturally innate talent, that’s a thought to get over before you are going to get better skills than your talent supports.

Anything worth doing is worth being bad at

“If a thing is worth doing it is worth doing badly”as G.K. Chesterton said in defense of hobbies, and just living your life. Excellent advice for personal life, no notes. A startup however is not a hobby and your motivation is not only to have fun. Nevertheless when there is a task that must be done, there’s a decision to make: do it badly, don’t do it, or manage its outsourcing.

Just keep swimming

if you make a habit of something you’ll keep doing it. If you practice out of habit because that’s what you do every day before you go to bed or the band always meets Monday evenings or the lessons you paid for are on Saturday morning, then that’s practice that’s happening. If you’re planning to practice when the moon is right and your finger doesn’t hurt and there’s no one in the house to hear you, that’s practice that is not happening. It’s better to do a little bit every day than to do a lot sporadically here and there. However, a bad habit is certainly possible to form too, so…

Do it right

This section starts with a Wyatt Earp quote, “Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything”. Accuracy leads to speed, but speed does not lead to accuracy. If you observe closely and slow down, you’ll improve, which lets you do it faster. The applicability of this concept to enterprise software development is extremely high, obviously. As one of the better leaders I’ve worked with is fond of saying, festina lente, or “make haste, slowly.”
There are practical aspects of doing so that are different between music and software and I won’t belabor those, I’ll just touch on a few concepts that have overlap:

• Do less, but do it right: instead of flailing on a whole song, only look at the part you’re having trouble with, all the way down to the transition between two notes. Do this as slowly as necessary to get it right. Spread your attention to what’s before and after. Speed up, just a little. This is what Agile sprinting was trying to say, pity they missed the metaphor since back-to-back sprints without recovery will produce vomiting instead of improvement.
• Start at the end: you’ve practiced that solo a hundred times and you can start it pretty well now, but the end is anyone’s guess? Or maybe your software projects always seem fine until you deploy them to customers? By starting at the end of the solo and mastering it measure by measure back towards the beginning, you capture the whole thing in your fingers and mind. By starting your project with the outcomes desired, you deliver those outcomes instead of the other stuff.
• Listen to yourself: record yourself practicing and listen to it. Fix the parts you don’t like. Do it again. In software, this is called measuring the Key Performance Indicators to ensure the Service Level Objective is met. Did you give up on the solo and return to the verse in a jarring way when you realized you were out of time? Hear it, note it, fix it, forever and ever amen.
• Use a metronome: we all have innate rhythm; our hearts beat, we walk, we breathe. Playing music rhythmically does not come naturally to everyone, any more than hearing notes: it is a thing to learn. A metronome not only helps you learn to produce rhythm, it helps you slow down enough to attain it. Again, accuracy. Software equivalent? The work in progress limit (how much are we attempting to do at once) and the definition of done (did we finish what we started). Each unit of work is a measure, which is the same amount of time. Are you trying to fit the whole chorus in a place it won’t fit and just speeding up to make it work? That won’t sound good.

I enjoyed the book, played my guitar this morning, will do so again before night. Four of four beats.