I’ve been thinking about motivation recently.
The author Brandon Sanderson talks about internal vs external motivation. He uses word counts like a competition with himself, and incorporates progress bars as the carrot/stick to motivate his writing.
This got me thinking as I’d always considered myself a very internally motivated, gung ho, go get ’em personality. But upon reflection I realised looking back, especially with music, I pushed myself and improved mostly with the help of external motivaters.
Lessons, concerts, performances. It all gave me that push to practice, prepare and put in the hours. It still does, and even more so as I have more time constraints and things to gobble up my time nowadays.
Of course there is an internal aspect to musicianship as well. You can’t spend hours in a practice room alone without some internal motivation as well (good practice techniques also needed). Only perfect practice makes perfect as my old department chair said.
So I developed my perhaps natural internal motivation into a high discipline level which I think classical music training is good at doing. These days though, the Occasional Violinist needs a dose of sheer terror (upcoming rehearsal) to get motivated!
In other news, I got to do some saltando bowing (richochet bow technique) at rehearsal this week which was fun and totally impossible with a Baroque violin bow!