Are You Achieving Your Full Potential?

Are you the guitarist you really could be? Many guitarists, at some point or another, experience a lack of motivation for practising. If this has happened to you, you should realise how this effects your practise routine. This lack of motivation could prevent you from fulfilling your full musical potential, or worse, put you off guitar playing forever! In this post I will address some of the issues that lead to this “musical burnout”, and what you can do to help prevent this from happening to you.

What Causes Burnout?

In order to face up to (and hopefully avoid) the main causes of this “musical burnout”, we must first define it. According to Wikipedia (a.k.a. the omnipotent force of the Internet), it is defined as follows:

“Burnout is a psychological term for the experience of long-term exhaustion and diminished interest” (read full article here)

So “burnout” is a mixture of exhaustion and lack of interest. It’s obviously in your interest to prevent this from happening- you don’t want to end up so uninterested in the guitar that you give up, or worse, be too exhausted to achieve your dreams! If we take the above definition, we have this equation:

Burnout = Exhaustion + Disinterest

Therefore, in order to avoid “burnout”, you have to avoid either “exhaustion” or “disinterest”- preferably both. Most of the time you can avoid exhaustion by rest- this means: not only getting plenty of sleep, but also by simply not overdoing it. Don’t get me wrong- practicing guitar is good for you- just don’t make it everything you do!

Let’s go over what we’ve got so far: to achieve your full potential on guitar, you need to avoid becoming burnt out; to prevent becoming burnt out you have to tackle exhaustion and disinterest; you can avoid exhaustion by getting rest. With me so far? Right, so what about preventing the other part of the sum, “disinterest”?

Tunnel Vision

When I first started playing the guitar I was inspired by such great names as: Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen (in fact, most of the guitarists on my “Top Ten Guitarists of All Time”)- but it was originally Hendrix. I wanted to be just like Jimi (except for the drugs part…): I had a fender strat, I was listening to the blues, I learnt to play behind my head etc,. There is nothing wrong with having a role model, in fact it’s a good thing! The interesting part is what happened next.

After two or three years of playing almost solid Jimi Hendrix (and related guitarists), I started to hit a wall. I had become as much like Jimi Hendrix as I could become- and I hadn’t had any of the success that Jimi had (not even close!). It was at this point that I realised that I wasn’t Jimi Hendrix, nor was I destined to be him (forgetting, of course, that I was neither Black, nor did I die in the 1970′s…). I was facing this exact problem: I couldn’t be the guitarists I wanted to be (because he was Hendrix), and I was becoming disinterested.

So where did I go from there? Did I give up? No. You see, I realised that just because I couldn’t be Jimi Hendrix, it was no reason to give up on my dream of being a guitarist! What I’m saying is: you should be the same- don’t be a sufferer of “Musical Tunnel Vision”!

Expanding Your Musical Horizons

Hopefully you’ve followed my logic on this, but I want to go over this anyway (it’s kinda important to the whole post…). Musical burnout limits your potential; Burnout is caused by a combination of exhaustion and disinterest; therefore we need to avoid exhaustion and disinterest. Now, exhaustion can mostly be solved with rest and not pushing yourself to inhuman levels, and now we’ve discovered that disinterest is caused by “tunnel vision”. The solution? Expand your musical horizons.

By expanding your musical horizons you expose yourself to new ideas and new musical techniques (which ultimately combine to allow you to develop your own musical “voice”). I know there are some of you out there who truly only want to play one style, and you will be happy with that- or, at least that’s what you think!

In part 2 we will be discussing further why its good to expand your musical horizons and really define your own style, and I will be suggesting ways in which to achieve that. Remember, you will not only be defining your own unique “voice”, but you will also be avoiding disinterest and really fulfilling your musical potential.

Read the second part here

October 5, 2009 at 12:20 pm | Practicing and Practice Routine | 3 comments

3 Responses to “Are You Achieving Your Full Potential?”

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3. Potential Energy…in Music | Chainsaw Guitar Tuition says:

   14/04/2010 at 11:05 pm

   [...] remember: Your Overall Potential = Your True Potential – Any Interference You [...]

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