Get your units up and watch what happens

Action is exponential.

The more we do things, the more we understand what doing means, and the greater our ability to do more things in the future.

We don’t even have to be good or right. We just need to get in motion.

Because every step we take will give us the knowledge, and more importantly the courage, to make another move, and then another.

And eventually quality will show up. It has to. The law of compound interest is not a fairy tale.

Volume can’t help but produce value.

Reminds me of my good friend, who started guitar lessons at the ripe old age of forty. We jammed together, and he was struggling to find usable chords for a new song he was writing.

I’m feeling so stuck. This progression sounds like every other song out there, and it feels so lame and derivative.

Of course it does. All early work feels like that. Probably will for a while. All you can do is keep writing. Keep starting and finishing songs, whether they’re good or not, and then move onto the next one. Practice powering through and writing all of those pseudo covers out of your system until you finally reach clean air where your authentic voice can shine.

Because once you get there, say, a few years from today, everything will click. You’ll start composing music that surprises you. You’ll finish a new one and think to yourself, man that’s actually not terrible.

Looking down at your guitar as if to realize, wow, all of my incremental action finally paid off. It’s creative muscle memory, and it allows you to make exponential strides with every new song you write.

Action shortens your learning curve that way. I’ve written hundreds of songs in my four decades of playing music, and the first few dozen were garbage.

The words were vague, juvenile and meaningless. The melodies were mundane with minimal emotional arcs. And many of the tunes were seven minutes long. Nevertheless, I still played those tunes for friends and family members, out at coffee shops and even once on a local cable access show.

Very kind of everyone to humor me.

Interestingly enough, none of those first batch songs actually made the final cut for my debut album years later. They’re lost to the world at this point.

And that’s okay. Because those song served an important purpose. They were mine, they were done, and they were necessary stepping stones to my growing creative confidence.

Writing and performing those songs taught me something about myself, about music, about songwriting and also about what it means to be an artist. They helped me practice taking what I felt, turning it into what I heard, and express that through the guitar. In a way that nothing else ever could.

How are you shortening your learning curve? Are you letting each of your creative gains make the next one easier to attempt?

It’s funny, the personal development cannon on shortening your learning curve says to set clear goals, spend money wisely, research incessantly, learn from other people’s mistakes, find mentorship, study your data and teach others.

Apparently, that’s where exponential growth comes from.

And they’re not wrong.

But so many of those recommendations are ancillary to the key task at hand. If you’re a songwriter and you want to get better songwriting, it’s not going to happen from reading more books on songwriting.

Only from writing more songs.

Apply that same principle to whatever you work is, and the law of compound interest will work for you too.

Get your units up and watch what happens.

How could you exponential increase your activity level?