Learning How to Learn (V): Discipline

You must be disciplined to stick to your goal of learning. This means you control yourself to consistently choose only the things that will help you achieve your goal. It also means you obey the laws that guide to the acquisition of your goal. Many people desire to learn something but at the same time desire a hundred other contradictory things. Others desire to succeed in learning but won’t follow the guiding principles. They want the “golden” egg without nurturing the “ordinary” goose that lays it. in both cases they’d meet with failure somewhere along the path.

This seems to be my story in my desire to learn to play the keyboard. Gift, my wife, bought a keyboard some years ago and I want to play. I don’t want to be the next Ludwig van Beethoven or another Alfred Cortot but just to learn how to strike some chords and make something that sounds like music. I have tried a lot of the tricks in the books. I have placed it in front of me, downloaded free tutorials on YouTube, told friends I’d soon be a keyboard player, but have ever since failed to make any progress. If I were to choose one single reason why I haven’t made progress I’d say I am not disciplined to learn it. The time I should use to practice I use to write or read an unrelated book. I’d even readily watch a movie than practice!

Discipline is indispensible to learning. “If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist,” said inspirational writer Neil Geiman. It is true because you require the discipline of writing even at times you aren’t inspired or feel like writing if you’ll be a novelist to be reckoned with.