I was practicing, and I was bored. — The other day I was playing through the beginning of the third movement of Mozart’s Sonata №12 in F major, K. …

Last night I stayed up late writing music. — Last night I stayed up late writing music. I’m paying for it now, in the sense that I’ve got to play the entire day tired, a bit headachy, a little slower and sludgier at everything I’m going to try to do. I didn’t need to stay up past my bedtime…

I wanted to show you what my piano practice looks like. — Happy Friday! Here are a bunch of quick thoughts before I get to work on a big freelance assignment: First, I wanted to show you what my piano practice looks like, keeping in mind that putting a camera in front of anything changes it slightly. …

I didn’t fully understand this until this past year. — Yesterday, I wrote a blog post titled “Everything Is Real.” That isn’t necessarily true. It’s true enough, within the context I was describing — the Hanon exercise is just as real (and should be given just as much focus and attention) as the Mozart sonata, and so on. But there’s…

Does that mean that everything requires discipline? — The other day I made the mistake — well, it was two mistakes, really. The first mistake was technical: a finger-striking issue in one of the Hanon exercises I was using as my piano-practice warm-up. The second mistake was critical: Don’t go back and fix that. You don’t have the…

Or, “make sure the tools you’re using are helping you solve the problem you’re trying to solve.” — Let’s start this one with a story. For the past month or so, I have been putting roughly 30 minutes per day into what you might call a formal study of chess middlegame concepts. The form I’ve been using for this study has been a book called Teach Yourself Better…

The conversation about discipline and specificity begins at the moment you discover you are unsatisfied with some aspect of your life. — It took me longer than you might realize to figure out how to begin this in-depth look into discipline and specificity. (Last week’s posts, in which I asked whether you could have specificity without discipline and then answered “discipline is committing to do the work to solve the problem; specificity…

It’s time for me to show my work. — I am SO EXCITED to finally have the first installment in the discipline and specificity series up, even though that first installment is really just “hey, I’m going to be writing about discipline and specificity for a while, hope you’re cool with that.” On Discipline and Specificity: Starting Thoughts Before I can start exploring the question at the core of all of these thoughts, I feel like I ought to define my terms.nicoledieker.medium.com

Before I can start exploring the question at the core of all of these thoughts, I feel like I ought to define my terms. — All right. I know I want to get some of these thoughts out of my mind and into the world, but I’m not quite sure where to begin. Before I can start exploring the big question at the core of all of this — which, by the way, is “what…