Practice until you never fail

Mostly, it is very easy to do the weekly brain dump that is my blog. Tonight, I feel rather empty. Strange. But it is the same pattern with my daily musical exercise. Some days are just totally off. The solution is fortunately extremely easy. Just do the task anyway. I am just too critical of myself and even if this will be my worst post so far, it will still be 1000X better than no piece at all. The unconditional importance of carrying on cannot be overstated. Besides, these worst days are the best and most important. They will ruthlessly reveal how good of a writer, or drummer or whatever you are. No-one cares what you can do on a good day. It is the bad day that counts. Don’t practice to win, if you want to become very good at something. Practice until you never fail instead.

DiaryRikard ÖqvistSeptember 4, 2023incremental improvement, practice, habits, exerciseComment

A lesson from physical labor

Last Saturday I spent digging around 15 meters of network cable in the ground. The only thing that remains now is to make a wall pass-through and install some wall outlets in the houses and then finally, all our houses are hard-wired with cat6 cables. It’s something that I have been waiting to do since we moved here, to get rid of the shaky Wi-Fi connection. But you must always rank-order your work and it took me four years to execute more important priorities before I could start solving this simple but highly annoying problem. And it felt so good to put it all back together. When I was done, it really struck me that there are few things that feels more satisfying than to complete some proper physical labor, to the degree that you can raise the “mission accomplished” sign.

Diary, Parenting, PhilosophyRikard ÖqvistSeptember 5, 2022parenting, work, exercise, scheduling, planning, productivityComment