Mela was determined to be the best, and he got there through practice. Lots and lots of practice. When the opportunity came, he left. He started first by playing in Mexico, then moved on to Boston, earning a degree at Berklee College of Music, one of the nation’s top conservatories. The faculty recognized Mela’s incredible perseverance and talent. They hired their new grad to teach during the day, and gave him the time to play at Wally’s Café Jazz Club at night. In those first few years, Mela was honing his own sound, blending modern jazz with the traditional music he’d grown up with in Cuba. Soon he released his own debut album, which The Village Voice called the best album of the year. Then he joined up with the world-renowned saxophonist Joe Lovano and recorded an album that aficionados considered Lovano’s most adventurous to date. For that album the band, including Mela, received a Grammy Award nomination. Then McCoy Tyner snapped him up. Today Mela is one of the most important Cuban drummers in jazz, according to JazzTimes magazine.
It wasn’t the family business. It wasn’t luck. It wasn’t being born at the right place at the right time, because Cuba then wasn’t. Mela made it, and made it big, through sheer force of practice. Despite the political odds and societal difficulties, he aspired to find an audience outside a country that did not want its people to leave. To be the best in Cuba, he dedicated himself to working up his chops. Mela spent hours practicing solo, rehearsing with bandmates, and performing live. Every day.
I’m not Cuban, but part of Mela’s story resonated with me. I wasn’t going to become a rocker (or a pastry chef, or an at-home barista capable of making a coffee that didn’t taste like dirty water, or any of my other aspirational conquests) by dabbling in the art once every few months. Watching Mela that night hammered home for me that the thrill of making it would require consistent and frequent effort.
I was self-aware enough to understand that moving my kit to Connecticut (to protect myself from noise complaints) was not going to create a routine or make drum practice a real habit. I wasn’t finding myself sitting in front of the kit often enough. I needed to take my efforts to another level.
I came to this realization at about the same time I met up with a longtime friend. Giorgio Piccoli is an accomplished entrepreneur and a master of habit. At twenty-seven years old, he created Americanflat, a curated gallery of museum-quality art collected from more than two hundred artists it represents all over the world, marketed to “art lovers, not investors” just starting to cover their walls. It established global on-demand printing capabilities in all countries in which it operates. Within seven years, Americanflat did $20 million in sales, in all continents but Antarctica, and proceeds of every sale are returned directly to the artists to support their craft.
At one point in our conversation, Piccoli pulled out his phone and on it I saw something unusual. It was his list of lists. Every day, for almost five years now, he had been making a list of ten things. Anything. He makes lists of ten ways to improve the experience of flying for people in wheelchairs, ten things people don’t like about picture frames, ten ways to grow basil. On one list he shared with me, I saw ten proposed business partnerships that resembled a game of celebrity hookup. What if Google and Amazon had a baby? What if Rosetta Stone and Lonely Planet got together? Could Instagram and GoPro revolutionize live streaming?
Piccoli was scrolling through his notes when he offered a quick example of how he finds inspiration. “We’re at Rosemary’s Restaurant, Emily, and you wanted a cocktail with rosemary but didn’t see one. If I was doing my list thing now, I’d write down ten menu items with rosemary they could add.” I asked him if these lists ever turned lucrative. Had they become the basis for some business venture? “Sometimes, yeah,” he said, “but more often than not, no.” Despite the lack of fiscal outgrowth from his habit, Piccoli says, they are a workout for his brain. He practices creative problem-solving and delving into new mental territory with each attempt. As he explained, I interrupted: “You’ve done this every day? That’s more than, like, eighteen hundred lists! That’s more than eighteen thousand things,” I said, astounded both that he’d stuck with it for so long and that I’d done that kind of math in my head after a glass of wine on a very empty stomach. “If most of the items on those lists aren’t going to be the next big thing, do you have to write them down?” “Oh yeah,” he said incredulously. “You have to write them down.”
That the written form is obligatory seemed so evident to him, but so dispensable to me at the moment. I have never been one to make to-do lists. The few times I’ve tried, crossing things off when I completed them didn’t rev me up. I put make to-do list on my to-do list, and crossed that off too. Didn’t do it for me either. My nonplussed reaction aside, plenty of other people feel empowered when they chronicle their responsibilities in this way. Maybe I was missing something of value in this organizational exercise.
Indeed I was.
Anecdotally, Piccoli’s daily lists reminded me of the only thing I ever tried to do daily in my life (except for showering, brushing my teeth, and flossing): practicing my saxophone. Back in grade school, I had made it a routine to practice nearly every day. How did I make that happen?
Rather than digging through my own memory vault, I called up my high school assistant band director. It had been twenty years—I knew because the reunion planning committee’s announcements were becoming a reminder of just how long it had been, and just how old I’d gotten. Would Bob Patterson even remember me?
He did. And the conversation was a great skip down memory lane. We talked about state marching band competitions and the perennial rival we could never quite topple, and reminisced about how bad the bus smelled on long road trips. After a while, I asked him how he got kids into a routine of practicing every day, or as close to that as possible. He reminded me of the time sheets we, the sprouting virtuosos, had filled out and turned in each week at our music lessons. We wrote down on a quarter sheet of paper how many minutes we practiced each day. I thought those weekly journals were for me, as a student, to prove to him, the teacher, that I had done the homework. Not so, he told me. It was really for the parents.
The power of materializing, here, came from keeping that now-old-fashioned handwritten time sheet. With this weekly review, parents verified and signed off on their children’s practice sessions before those reports were turned in to teachers. This visual aid told parents if and when they’d carved out time in their family’s schedule for their children’s practice, and how often or how infrequently that goal of daily practice had been met. By writing it down, parents could visually take stock of how each week went and whether the goal was met, making them accountable not only to the band’s director but also to their children and themselves.
I was far from a high school teenager anymore—the wrinkles on my face gave that fact away. But back then I’d been a pretty good sax player, and my teachers’ scheme for increasing the number of practice sessions was likely a part of the recipe for musical success. I decided to sample that strategy again—with the added adaptation of my mother’s approach to getting me to do chores as a child. Every time I carved out time to practice, I gave myself a gold star. I took one of those free calendars that come in the mail around the time nonprofits are soliciting year-end donations, and I slapped a sticker on each day to commemorate my scheduling victory. Found a chunk of time to practice drums? Way to go, me! Give myself a sticker.