The Ibis

Last week I enjoyed sharing the clip The Drawing Advice That Changed My Life. Many of you appreciated it too. Ben found an analogy in his own life to the video. In his daughter’s lessons, the piano drills was “drawing the ibis” but the singing that she’s discovering by being forced to do piano drills every day is the “social commentary” from the video. I encourage watching the clip if you haven’t. For posterity, the 4 tips at the end:

• “Action comes before motivation”. Not the other way around.
• “Quantity leads to quality”. In other words, you suck when you start. How else would you expect it to be?
• “Don’t let thinking be a form of procrastination”. Thinking is not doing. I say it all the time: you can’t introspect your way forward. Thinking feels like doing but it’s not.
• “Constraints lead to creativity”. Too much freedom will actually stop you from being creative. This rhymes with necessity being the mother of invention. A guitar teacher once encouraged me to do nothing but use one string. Masters like Clapton and Hendrix got infinite mileage out of a 5 note scale.