Mary Martin was a singer on Broadway and she starred in musical comedy; a lot of people saw her in the early days of television starring as Peter Pan---she also starred in South Pacific and The Sound of Music.
A small woman, a big voice, and in the early days of Broadway, they didn't have microphones on the performers like they do today---today, you put a microphone in their ear or on their clothing and you can hear them, they can speak softly and you can hear them in the balcony and everything is fine.
But in those days if you were on stage in a musical, your voice had to fill the whole theater. This huge theater and you had to fill it. So, little Mary Martin decided "I want to give myself an advantage as a performer that the others don't have," so what she finally thought to do was every time she learned her songs, she would then take a big punching bag---one of those big bags, not like those little rapid bags you hit with your wrists, but one of those huge big bags---body sized bags---and she would put on boxing gloves, and she would sing her songs while punching that bag at full force.
And once she could sing the whole song while doing that at full volume, then she could do it on stage. So if she had to walk across the stage while singing, she had to dance while singing, if she had to fly (like in Peter Pan on cables) while singing, it was easy for her, because she had already PRACTICED that while pounding that big bag with her gloves on, and singing during that; and she developed such huge lung power that people thought "Wow, she is amazing, she is a natural, look at what she was born with". And people would write reviews "that little lady was born with a huge voice." So people rhapsodize about how other people have these gifts because there is a myth going around that everything is fixed, and that success comes from other unfair advantages people already have, and usually "unfair advantage" is a phrase used in my mind to depress myself with. That's the usual use of the phrase. I mean it doesn't have a positive context that I know of.
Yet I use it when I teach success, because if you can create an unfair advantage for yourself you are way ahead. So look for where that would be. Pick an area you want to succeed in and think about how you might create- .... through practice....CREATE, not "already have," not "be born with"---but create an unfair advantage for yourself. Through the simple but so underrated practice called practice.
Malcom Gladwell's new book, OUTLIERS, talks about how many more hours the Beatles had played than other bands of their time. They started out in the city of Hamburg.
Gladwell says, "And what was so special about Hamburg? It wasn't that it paid well. (It didn't.) Or that the acoustics were fantastic. (They weren't.) Or that the audiences were savvy and appreciative. (They were anything but.) It was the sheer amount of time the band was forced to play. Here is John Lennon, in an interview after the Beatles disbanded, talking about the band's performances at a Hamburg strip club called the Indra: "We got better and got more confidence. We couldn't help it with all the experience playing all night long. It was handy them being foreign. We had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over. In Liverpool, we'd only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing."
The Beatles ended up traveling to Hamburg five times between 1960 and the end of 1962. On the first trip, they played 106 nights, of five or more hours a night. Their second trip they played 92 times. Their third trip they played 48 times, for a total of 172 hours on stage. The last two Hamburg stints, in November and December 1962, involved another 90 hours of performing. All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, they had performed live an estimated 1,200 times, which is extraordinary. Most bands today don't perform 1,200 times in their entire careers. The Hamburg crucible is what set the Beatles apart."
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In my book REINVENTING YOURSELF I urged people to make a decision today to take possession of the most powerful weapon there is in the battle against a mediocre life. That weapon is called practice.
And it is, indeed, a secret to 99.9 percent of America. Pick it up and you'll give yourself what feels like an unfair advantage over everyone else you know.
Academy Award winner Anthony Hopkins over-rehearses. In preparation for the movie Nixon-his greatest challenge as an actor-he rehearsed each scene more than 100 times before shooting it.
I know great salespeople who over-prepare in the same way. They learn so much about a sales prospect's business that the prospect wants to make the salesperson a partner after their first meeting. Selling becomes easy. It becomes almost irrelevant compared to the shared enthusiasm of the two people.
Legendary trial lawyer Gerry Spence talks about how he developed his mesmerizing voice through singing and loud rehearsals in his car driving to work in the morning. Spence would rehearse the expression of various emotions, booming his voice through the interior of his car. When he spoke in the courtroom, everyone sat up and took notice. If the opposing attorney had a bland, monotonous voice, it was because he didn't know about the secret: practice. The opposing attorney probably thought his voice was a part of his personality. He probably thought his opponent, Spence, was born with a gift.
When the San Francisco 49ers are finished with a practice session, one player stays on the field. He asks one of the backup quarterbacks to stay with him to throw him passes. That player is Jerry Rice, the best pass receiver of all time. By practicing more than anyone else in professional football, Jerry Rice goes into each game knowing he has an advantage. There is no faster route to self-confidence and self-esteem than practice.
Many many many many years ago when I was a slovenly counterculture hippie rebel beatnik student, I used to hang out at a little coffee house in Tucson, Arizona, called Ash Alley. There was a little-known folksinger who sang there on occasion, and I loved to hear her sing. One night someone in the audience requested a song and she declined to sing it, although she said she knew it. She told the audience that she never performed a song until she had sung it 200 times in private, making it her own. The singer's name was Judy Collins. I saw her song-ownership idea as a charming little ritual. I was too hip at the time to realize that she was talking about practice.
Jack Twyman was an NBA star who had the odd habit of arriving early at practice and shooting the ball exactly 200 times before real practice began. Sportswriters used to call him one of the greatest "pure shooters" the game had ever seen. By "pure" they meant that his smooth, accurate shots flowed from him naturally, as if he were born shooting. They didn't know his secret. His shooting was made pure through practice.
Malcom Gladwell's book cites case after case where people who we thought simply had amazing talent, actually, like the Beatles, had practiced more than anyone else. What a secret.
I'm starting a group for people interested in this kind of thing. It is called CLUB FEARLESS: World Mastermind. It's for people more interested in immediately AVAILABLE creative ACTION than alibis and victim stories. We are owners or we are victims. And we become one or the other through practice. We become fearless, too, through practice. And my club will be a place for people to be inspired to do their practice. This club will rock, and it will circle the world.
Steve, I like the story of Mary Martin and the punching bag. And you're right about intense practice giving the false appearance of sheer giftedness. I don't want to pour any cold water on this observation, but one objection (you probably hear this, too) is that Martin still needed some kind of proclivity toward music in the first place. A lot of people could sing and punch that bag decade upon decade without ever becoming a strong musical performer.
Similarly, I'm convinced I could practice mathematics for years and years and never be a good mathematician. I'd get better than I am now, but I wouldn't be as good as someone who is "wired" for that kind of thinking. (Or is there really no "wiring" or "knack" for anything?)
Just curious what you think about this.
Posted by: SteveJ | December 02, 2008 at 05:30 AM
Great blog!
Posted by: Bob | December 02, 2008 at 06:04 PM
YES there is "wiring" and "knack" and proclivity and innate talent....but once you find that (and everyone has it) then PRACTICE is what makes you great or good or mediocre or awful ... depending on your practice.......
Posted by: Steve Chandler | December 06, 2008 at 10:13 AM
Hi Steve, I too am a big believer in practice, practice, practice.
Wrote an article a couple of years ago about Ten Thousand Hours: The Awesome Power of Passion, Persistence, and Practice [ it's at http://hubpages.com/hub/10-000-Hours--The-Awesome-Power-of-Practice ] if you want to take a look at it.
I was also struck by Gladwell's comments that behind 'knack and wiring', there is cultural heritage. And his idea that Asians don't really have a knack for math, they have a knack for hard work and staying with a challenge until they get it. And that knack comes from the circumstances of wet-ricing cultivation, which takes long hours, every day of the year.
Makes me wonder if the knack is really cultural and not a "born with" capacity. He says "not so" with math. Lots to ponder!
Posted by: Bruce Elkin | January 05, 2009 at 01:59 PM