It’s not the amount of days that count, it’s the hours…and you have more hours than you think. Quick story.

It was the end of my sophomore year of high school at All-Saints Episcopal School when I knew without a doubt I wanted to become a professional musician, but there was one major problem in doing that… my skills. My skills as a pianist were far from professional, I could barely read music, couldn’t play in all 12 keys, and outside of a handful of Jerry Lee Lewis tunes, I was pretty limited on what I could actually play. So what’s a teenager to do? How did I go from that situation of being extremely limited and far from professional to in two years playing my first international shows in England and in France?

Well, I put in the hours. And it started with doing some simple math. Lemme break it down for ya.

Most of my musician peers were far ahead of me because of the head start of YEARS they had, starting lessons from roughly age 5. Me being already 15 years old I had 10 years of work to make up…. and fast! Because the idea of waiting 10 years til’ I was “good enough” to be a professional musician and strengthen my playing was totally not an option….HARD PASS, I was on a mission to do it all in 2 years. By the time I graduated from high school.

And this is where the HOURS come into play.

Now, let’s be real for a sec… there’s no way to put in the same amount of days of work and practice in 2 years that somebody else did in 10 years, it’s impossible! BUT just like you’re Rockstar Habit Can Do, I challenged myself to find a way that I COULD figure something out.

I figured most of my peers practiced about 60 minutes a day 5 days a week, with an hour lesson once a week. So 6 hours a week. Coming to an estimated amount of time of 312 hours of practice per year and roughly 3,120 hours over 10 years.

Ok cool. 3,120 hours of practice that’s the number I needed to hit.

I had 2 years to do it – how many hours a day did I need to practice to hit my goal?

Well,  there’s 365 days in a year, 2 years comes to 730 days. Divided by 3,120 hours comes to only a little over 4 hours of practice a day every day.

That’s not too bad.

Granted I knew there was no way to practice every day, because ya know, life? AND a person would go crazy!! BUT by that math (4 hours a day) I just needed to practice piano about 28 hours a week. Heck, I spent half that much time just playing videos game, so I knew I could make it work for something like piano, something I was passionate about, something I loved. The same way Will Johnston had his desire to become a pro too, which you can check out in the episode “Be The Best”

So the plan was simple. Practice 28 hours a week, and in 2 years time I would be good enough to go pro and start touring. There was just 1 other problem to figure out….where and how was I going to find the time every day to practice piano?? Especially since ya know…. I WAS STILL IN SCHOOL!? Well, check out this article here for what happened next… #putemup

P.S. Check out this interview with Kobe Bryant talking about the same kinda thing! It’s all about putting in the hours!