How to Make Piano a Habit You Actually Keep
Motivation
Over the past 16 years, I’ve taught well over a thousand different students and given feedback to or helped tens of thousands more learning pianists in some form. Throughout those 16 years, I’ve noticed that certain patterns have emerged in the ability to stick to the piano for the time it takes to actually get good at it. I can usually tell almost immediately if someone is likely to be able to commit to it, and those that end up quitting typically don’t quit because they don’t want to get better, but because they’re approaching learning the piano in the wrong way.
The most typical sign of someone that will quit is someone that believes that they can do something to cut down the time needed to learn rather than treating the process of acquisition as the fun part itself. That might be by learning a very difficult piece and believing that if they have enough sticking power to get through that piece, they can shortcut all the easier pieces that other people seem to be learning. They could also be by trying to do something like practising for 10 hours per day in order to cut short the time it’ll take to learn the piano.
The reality is that both of these are a problem for three different reasons. Firstly, it completely disregards the way that the brain actually learns. In order to actually learn something, our brain needs to consolidate, process, and convert from short-term memory to long-term memory. The way that we build cognitive and motor skills is very well documented. Particularly for motor skills, we need repeated exposure with rest in between to automate a movement.
Secondly, it assumes that learning the piano has a fixed destination, that you need a finite amount of hours or a finite amount of skills to have then learnt the piano. However, very much like if you were an actor trying to learn a new script, each script requires time and effort to learn, no matter how long you’ve been acting (or reading). This is true for music too. Every new piece of music takes time to learn, learn from, understand, and be able to reproduce.
Finally, it relies entirely on motivation. Motivation is fleeting as circumstances change and interest changes, too. You may feel an initial burst of motivation when first starting to learn the piano because it’s exciting and new. However, in order to get good at the piano, you have to be able to keep improving with or without motivation as the seasons change. So if your practice relies on motivation, eventually, without motivation, you’ll stop practicing.
This means that the goal is not to become permanently motivated. It’s to create a way of learning that doesn’t rely on motivation.
System
The aim of the game is to build a habit so strongly that you don’t ask yourself on a daily basis if you’re going to practice the piano, it’s just part of your normal day in the same way that, for me, making a coffee is part of my normal day. The way to do this is to build a system around practicing and reduce the resistance.
There is a lot of research on general habit formation, which I have found to be somewhat reflective of how I managed to never quit (despite also having times of no motivation).
Firstly, practicing at the same time every day. When I was studying at music college, I booked a practice room every morning from 6-9am. It became completely normal to get up at 5am, get myself ready, and walk over in order to practice at that time. This was born out of necessity to some extent because throughout the day, it became much more difficult to book practice rooms. However, repeating the same thing over and over again every day and having it just be an expectation that I would do that every morning not only meant that I’d done many hours before most people even got to music college, but it also meant that it wasn’t even a question whether I was going to practice on any given morning.
There is also habit stacking, which is the famous concept from writer James Clear. He suggests that stacking habits on top of each other makes it easier to introduce new habits. For example, if you wanted to start reading books more, if you place that next to an existing habit, it becomes easier to introduce and maintain. So for me, if I grabbed a book while making my coffee every morning and then read a chapter each day, this would much more easily be able to become part of my routine. Research shows that it takes an average of 66 days for a new habit to become automated.
Along with more general practices like these, there are also things that you can do to remove resistance from the practice itself.
Firstly, you can plan your practice. Something I used to do extensively before actually going to practice while at music college was write down exactly what I wanted to work on in each of the pieces/scales/sight reading/etc. for that day. I knew, when actually practicing, that as long as I worked through that list, I was going to keep progressing because it was a combination of learning new bars along with spending time working on things that still needed work.
Planning practice itself has the risk of adding more resistance if you take time out of your day to do it (which is how I did it). However, during the practice itself, you can make bullet points as you go for the things you want to do next, then each day, you already know what you’re going to be doing, and it becomes a box-checking exercise. For example, if you practice your scales, once you finish your scales, you could make a note of any ones that you want to do again tomorrow, or if you want to add a new one tomorrow. In a piece, if there’s a bar you’re struggling with, you could write down that you want to do that again tomorrow, or you could write the next couple of bars that you need to learn tomorrow.
You’re much more likely to sit down at the piano and keep improving if you know that today at 8am you are going to make a coffee and have a go at a D major scale and learn the next two bars of a piece, than if the goal is to maybe play the piano sometime today and you don’t know what you’re going to do until you sit down.
It’s also important to divide your practice into particular elements. When I was at school, it was often said to me that we can’t focus on a single task for more than 20 minutes. I’m not sure on the validity of that, however, I do think it is true that we can focus for longer if there is novelty. Dividing your practice into three parts (scales, sight reading and pieces), and then having multiple pieces to practice too, can help segment the things that you’re approaching in any given practice session into short, digestible sections.
It’s actually surprisingly easy to focus at the piano for more than an hour if you spend 15 minutes on scales, 15 minutes on sight reading, 20 minutes on a piece, and 20 minutes on a second piece.
Longevity
You may be thinking that, of course, this is somewhat easy in theory; however, life doesn’t really work like that. You may have work or family commitments, and it’s not always possible to practice at the same time every day and spend that kind of time learning.
However, this is the difference between a system and a routine. Systems create routines and a system never fails, it adapts to your circumstances. Practicing at 6am everyday is a routine, habit stacking and aiming to practice at a similar time each day is a system.
Another example; planning your next session as you go through your practice is something that can be done in any practice, regardless of the situation. Whereas practising for 6 hours is something that can’t be done regardless of the situation. You can have a routine of practicing for that amount of time each day, but if something comes up, the routine by itself may collapse.
The key to longevity is to plan for the bare minimum. What do you do on the worst day?
What causes most people to quit is their bare minimum day being nothing and those bare minimum days becoming a new learned routine. Those that manage to keep improving over the long term are those that will keep going and just do something on the piano and still identify as a piano player on those days no matter what. Maybe that’s just playing a scale or just playing the last bars that you learned a couple of times to consolidate them. Even when you don’t have access to a piano, learning a new concept that you can look for in your pieces, or working out some of the chords, can keep you moving forward and keep the piano a consistent part of your day.
The key to learning the piano over the long term is to realise that the process of learning the piano itself and discovering something new is the entire point. Very much like doing a crossword or a Sudoku, the process, the act of working things out, and the feeling of improvement makes it enjoyable without the need for motivation.
Matt