Feeling Bad Is a Sign That Something Needs to Change

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 is what you get after the problem is solved,” were technically an introduction.)

But when it came to me — while I was practicing, naturally — it seemed obvious.

The conversation about discipline and specificity begins at the moment you discover you are unsatisfied with some aspect of your life.

Feeling bad about something, for lack of a better phrase, is a sign that something needs to change.

What does that mean? If you’re at the piano, it means that whatever little bit of the music that isn’t coming out the way you want it to — whatever trill or articulation or ornament prompts a twinge of dissatisfaction every time you play it — has to be addressed. Given focus. The relationship between cause and effect has…