Once upon a time I studied to become a professional musician. I learned some core tenets of "learning," or maybe we can say "improvement," from that time. I would recommend everyone spend time in formalized study of some kind of instrument.

The biggest, most important thing that I learned was the value, no, not even the importance, but the requirement, of daily practice. I started out as a kid not practicing at all or very sporadically. As I grew more serious and passionate, I began to regularly practice 30 minutes a day, most days a week. Sometimes I had bad weeks, of course, and only practiced 3 or 4 days. The thing was, every day I practiced could be heard in the way I sounded at my lesson at the end of the week. I started practicing nearly every day for 30 minutes. Then every day for 45, then an hour, then 2. Yup, by the time I went off to college it was de rigeur for me to practice every day for one and a half to two hours. And it didn't even hurt. And you could hear it.

What I learned, over the course of this 'transformation,' was that how I felt when I started my practice session each day didn't matter. I could feel like crap. I could want to practice, I could hate practicing with my entire soul. I could feel great. I could really want to practice one thing, I could really want to do nothing but scales, whatever. No matter how I felt, whether I put 100% of my energy into that practice or not, simply doing it had an impact, and a positive one, on how I sounded at my lesson at the end of the week. (Which rolls into "how I sounded at my concert, how I sounded the next year, etc, etc.")

I had terrible practice sessions where everything went wrong. I had great ones. I had ones that I started with a black mood about everything but things still went right. I had things I started positively and I still tripped in the same place I'd tripped last week. None of this mattered.

What mattered was putting time in.

It was never about "being inspired." It was never about having "musician's block." Those don't exist and don't impact, aren't allowed to impact, a musician's day-to-day. Simply put, I had to put the time in, and nothing else mattered. But god damn, no matter what, putting the time in got results. Often I felt better at the end of a session than I did going in. Often it was more rewarding, more interesting, less boring, etc, whatever, than I expected. Often those 30 minutes flew by way faster than I thought they would, even though I'd done them yesterday and the day before and you'd think I'd have realized it by then.

By the end I no longer fought against practicing, mentally, because I realized it didn't matter so long as I put the time in. I realized it wasn't that bad, in fact it was pretty great and helped me. I started to find it meditative and relaxing in ways. I gave up, most days, on the bad attitude because after years I realized the bad attitude was just a hurdle trying to stop me from something that would not only make me feel good when I went to bed that night but had a definite, measurable, positive impact on something at which I wanted to succeed.

I have learned nothing so valuable as the lesson of practice. Of simply putting time in. You can throw shit down on paper and yeah, it's shit. But you did it.

I try to never feel bad about putting shit down. I need to write a lot of shit out before I get to the good stuff, sometimes. I'm still writing. I feel that even the shittiest writer can improve in writing by doing it every day, simply because they become more familiar and comfortable with using language, the mechanics of language as well as writing, with the thought process of writing.

So far I have not come across an arena yet where this philosophy: the value of daily practice - is not only applicable but immensely valuable.

I think you should try to silence the voice in your head that is saying, when you write, "This is shit. This is shit. There's no point. Just stop now. You're an embarrassment. You're a failure." Or better yet. Don't silence the voice. Say, "Maybe it is. But so what?"

You've said it to me yourself and quite recently: how can you hope to be a success if at first you do not fail, at least a little? Let the shit spew onto the page. Sometimes, it takes you for crazy interesting rides. Just do it. And do it tomorrow. And do it the next day. And do it, and do it, and do it.

Buy a timer, set it for fifteen minutes, put it where you can't see, and write until it goes off. I like the 15 minute comment. I think it can be applied to this. 15 minutes is small and not scary. Try it.

Put your ass on the line.

Make failure a position of devastation, to your finances to your ego.

You would be surprised what skin in the game brings to the equation.

But hey, I just opened a coffee shop that if it doesn't succeed will put my family out on the streets, so maybe I'm biased.

Find what works for you.

My advice - break down big goals into small ones that you can achieve in 1 day.

If you fail, don't stress! Change can take years.

Even 15 minutes of achievement matters. Every big goal is achieved through an accumulation of 15 minute portions.

In my own life, I taught myself how to program by giving up constantly. The first time I tried to program, I didn't even succeed in getting the compiler to work! I couldn't even get the "hello world" program to run. I gave up for months. But I kept coming back to it (and giving up) and now I'm pretty good - I even lived off income from programming contract work for 2 years.

Divide every big goal into small parts, sit down and divide your ultimate goal into small parts, then those goals into small parts, and then those...

Hopefully you will now have such a small list that you see what you need to do this week. And then you do that. Forever.

It's really hard. But that's what works best for me.

All right hard work is a not-so-clear concept for most of us. I mean "hard work"? Am I supposed to do some blue collar stuff? What does it mean?

Let's break it down. Let's break down what we feel during our journey into "hard-work".

Stage 1:

What happens when you attack a challenging problem. You think, you re-think, slowly it drives you out of your comfort zone and now it starts to pain. Your body recognizes you are in pain and tries to put you off it. (Oh I don't wanna do it, so boooring. Oh wait the answer key would be here somewhere. Let me check my friends' code). But our brain is curious too. And if the problem is interesting enough to you you will persevere. You will look at it from different angles and you keep at it, until you reach stage 2

Stage 2:

Now you have tried a lot of possibilities and yet you are unable to wrap your head around it, you start to get agitated and irritated. "WTF man! Why why???" You'll start getting super frustrated. If your grandmom was looking at you now she would tell you to stop and take a break. But that problem is still crucial and interesting to you. Wise men would tell you to break the problem in super tiny chunks and go over the above process again, draw things out, start explaining your solution to yourself etc. etc. You start questioning everything you ever did trying to find a root cause. And when there is none in sight, anger seeps in and you start banging things (Fuck this shit, why is there a seg fault in a cout statement AAAAAHHHHH). After all the banging, hatred and blaming is over you move onto stage 3

Stage 3:

This is a very depressing stage, you are sad, you have tried everything and you have become emotionally very vulnerable. Even small things hurt you. You start thinking you are dumb and useless and probably all this is not meant for you. You become sadder and sadder due to helplessness. That is why it is not recommended that you traverse this stage alone. Make sure you have someone working with you on this. This is also the time most people take a break (take a nap best thing possible). But if you keep at it or come back and do it or you ask someone for desperate help you move onto stage 4

Stage 4:

You finally solve your problem and the deeper the stage you were in the more happiness you feel (and also the most exp you gain). This surge of dopamine is what makes you go through the whole process again. Take up another interesting problem and dig at it again.

You NEEED to go through this process multiple times and love it! Go through it and you will start appreciating hard work. Start looking forward to frustration and the above signs. This will tell you that you are getting closer to solve it, turn it into a game. Ohh I am in stage 3, shit if I solve it I would get butt loads of EXP.

SO to summarize(or TL;DR):

1.Find a interesting problem and (it should mean more than just that grade on your report card, else you will quit in the early stages)

2. Be conscious of frustration and start to love it. (If you are not getting frustrated you are not learning- I use this as my mantra)

3. Keep practicing and experiencing going through it again and again. (Hey, hard work is an acquired taste)

Hard work is hard. If you think you're doing hard work and yet you haven't thought of quitting, you're not doing hard work. If you haven't thought of failure and how easy it would be to turn out the light and go to bed, to take care of it in the morning, or some distant morning after you've had some 'time to restore yourself' you're not doing hard work. Hard work is not done in one day, and getting started the next day is the hardest part of any of it.

The path to the second excuse is laid with the first excuse and there is no good first excuse for something that you really want to do. When you want something, resilience becomes the only choice. It is a de facto state rather than something to become. You will be driven by your end goal over all other concerns. Resilience is the ability to be taken back by reality wearing down on you and yet lean in harder and push forward until you either fail, or succeed. Either are incredibly rewarding goals.

Lose the sense that you're going to do the right thing. You're not. There's no such thing.

There's really only the things that you do. Some of them will be really cool and move you closer to your vision. Some of them will be really awful and move you farther away. This doesn't make the action right or wrong, it just gives you new data. Collect that data from everything you do and apply it to your vision.

I also got rid of any real goals. At this point I have this idea in my head, a vision of the thing I'm trying to build and do. Whenever I try something, I gauge if I'm closer to or farther from that vision and act accordingly. This keeps me motivated because either my goals were too easy and I had false sense of accomplishment hitting them, or they were too hard and I felt discouraged. Now I'm just enjoying the journey.

Lastly, you don't really need to be hard working. You need to understand what it is you're trying to do and recognize what's getting you there and what's a distraction. You need to recognize that hearing "no" isn't the end, but neither is hearing "yes". You're setting out to do something in the world, know what that is and use it as your guiding light. So long as you can find and hold on to that, the rest will take care of itself.