Practice

 Alec Degnats

Practice

A young tourist lost in New York walks up to a local and asks him,“How Do you get to Carnegie Hall?”

The man looks back for a second, takes a deep breath and answers: “Practice, Practice, Practice...”

It is an old joke that I hope a few of you have heard before. However with that said this old joke along with a thing called Camp Jam really got me thinking about practice and how it is important to everything in our lives, not just sports or music.

When was the last time you heard a professional athlete, musician, or entertainer say that they got where they were through being lazy, stubborn, and an unwilling to work? I'll give you a minute if you want, because to be honest I never have.

LeBraun James, arguably the best basketball player alive, dedicates his off season to studying with people he feels have mastered a part of the game that he needs to improve upon. World famous jazz pianist Chick Corea once said, “I practice at least four hours a day because if I did not I would not be able to perform at the level I am expected to.”

We often forget that everyone practices all the time and that most likely the people that we consider the best of the best are that way because once they got there they never stopped getting better.

With this in mind though it is important to understand that we are always practicing and creating our own reality and more importantly who we want to be. Every action that we take is a practice step towards what we are going to become.

Whether it is music, sports, writing, sales, accounting, politics, religion, exercise, etc... we are always practicing the person that we are and the person that we are becoming. How we view and interpret the world is all done through experience and how we interact with it.

With this in mind I ask all of us to find our Carnegie Hall. Think about where you want to go, who you want to be, and what will make you happy. Then I challenge all of us to start practicing in an effort to reach those goals.