How to keep up a daily habit

[I wrote this as a guest post for DIEMlife, a platform that brings people together to achieve their goals, or Quests. Check it out on the DIEMlife blog here or below.]

Rachel Weisz was quiet for a moment, taking in what I just said. After a pause, she breathed deeply and said, “Wow. That’s intense.”

As piano students at Juilliard, a friend and I had been asked to help Ms. Weisz prepare her for a role in the film Complete Unknown, in which she plays a former piano prodigy. What I had just said to her was this: “If you don’t practice one day, you don’t get that time back. It’s gone forever.” My friend Kristen added, “Every day, you’ll have a choice between practicing and everything else – going out, hanging out with friends. And sometimes it’s tough making the sacrifices so that you get your practicing done.”  

Talking about our lives as musicians to an outsider, especially an outsider as gracious, thoughtful, and kind as Rachel (seriously folks, she’s the real deal – what a great person and artist), made me realize how hard it can be to sustain a daily habit. I used to be an outsider myself – I came to Juilliard to escape a corporate law job where I often worked all night and all weekend and all holidays. But those long hours were never of my own choosing. By contrast, students at Juilliard seemed hell-bent on practicing all the damn time, locking themselves in tiny windowless rooms all day. That level of daily dedication was overwhelming to me, and I thought I knew what it meant to work a lot!!

I was curious to learn how these young artists stayed so dedicated to their daily practice. After all, we’ve all experienced plenty of reasons not to stay on track! Maybe our schedules or plans change, or work or personal life gets out of hand, or our physical or mental energy levels just aren’t there. And then we feel discouraged or start to think of the habit as a chore, further ensuring that we won’t get to it.

I’ve totally been there. But you know what? This happens to EVERYONE, including musicians. It turns out that practicing every day for hours is just as hard as keeping up any other regular commitment, whether that’s learning a new skill, working out, cultivating a professional network, or anything else that will build your mind, body, and spirit.

How, then, do musicians do it? In my musical training, I’ve learned three very doable strategies to keep up my daily commitments, even when the going gets tough.

1. RECONNECT WITH YOUR MOTIVATIONS

This strategy is great when you just don’t have it in you to tackle your habit. Instead, why not use the time to connect to your key motivations for your goal? Think back to the WHY of your Quest, including the people, places and things that inspired you: is it to have more time for your family? To feel good about your body and have more energy? To pay down debt so that you finally feel financially free? Any activity that gets you reconnected to these motivations will likely fire you back up about getting there.

In my world, if I just don’t feel like sitting down at the piano bench, I’ll do something else to remind me how awesome it is to be a musician – I’ll sit down and listen to some recordings of the most electrifying playing I can find (unrelated to my repertoire!), or I’ll marvel at other forms of expression, such as dance or drama or literature, to remind myself how important art is to humanity. If your day is so frazzled that you can’t even get a clear picture of your key motivations, it might be helpful to meditate to recover a calm, connected, and clear state of mind. Doing any of these things is time just as well spent.

2. REMEMBER THAT TODAY’S WORK IS PAYING IT FORWARD TO YOUR TOMORROW SELF

Anyone who has done weight training knows this – your muscles won’t necessarily feel any different as you’re doing your reps, but they sure might the next day. Many habits which build cumulatively over the long-term are just like this – as you put in the work today, you’re building your tomorrow self. Learning a language, losing weight, starting a new business – these are all investments in your future self, and the tasks of today might not be the most fun. But once you see how the work you did yesterday paid off, it’s a little easier to keep yourself on task.

As a pianist, there’s a lot of nitty-gritty work at all stages of my preparation, whether it’s learning a slew of notes in a difficult contemporary score, refining tiny passages that just don’t sound the way I want yet, or practicing performing in front of as many people as possible to get every last kink out of a piece. On days when playing doesn’t necessarily feel the most “fun” but I really put my attention to the task at hand, I know that I’ll probably see the improvement tomorrow. It’s amazing – when I validate and celebrate yesterday’s hard work, it makes today’s easier to do.

I keep a tiny notebook as a practice log where I record eureka moments and any newfound principles I’ve picked up. Seeing my daily work as an incremental step towards my goals, rather than a chore,  absolutely keeps me motivated. So, on days when you just can’t get to an hour-long habit session, why not take just 10 minutes to reflect on all the progress you have made?

3. GO CRAZY WITH INTERMEDIATE GOALS

Many times a worthwhile goal can be too big and thus paralyzing, or too distant to spur action. Well-spaced intermediate milestones are great for keeping up your motivation. When a big performance is coming up, you’d better bet that I’ll be scheduling mini-performances all along the way, even if it’s playing for one person in a practice room or recording a piece on my phone to email to someone. This gives my daily practice more direction than just the end goal. As you may have noticed, these intermediate goals work best when you call on people to keep you accountable, whether it’s signing up for a 5k with a buddy before a longer race or promising a trusted friend a draft of the first few chapters of your book. Luckily, DIEMlife is set up so that you can keep track of all of these milestones. When in doubt, add more intermediate goals! They give you the chance to both reflect and celebrate how far you’ve already come.

Ultimately, it’s important to be proud of yourself for taking the long road, for tackling a Quest that requires such commitment. It’s not easy, but it surely doesn’t require superhuman powers. You can do it! And when you reach your goal, your tomorrow self will thank you.

Contemplations on a Jar of Iced Tea

One lazy spring day in law school, I was discussing with a then-boyfriend the materials and methods for really great iced tea. He mentioned something I had never heard of: sun tea. 

“Yeah,” he said. “You put some tea bags in a big glass jar and then you leave it outside for a few days, and then you have great iced tea!

“A FEW DAYS?,” I asked. “That can’t be right.” I was often skeptical of what he said and didn't hesitate to say so.

“No, it’s true. My dad always made it this way. Trust me.” 

“YOU LEAVE IT OUT FOR DAYS? Hahaha. Great way to make BACTERIA tea,” I cackled. 

“Look, you don’t know because you’ve never done it, but my family has been making sun tea like this forever. And it’s really good.”

“FOR DAYS! HAHAHAHA!” <cackling intensifies>

“Fine. You don’t believe me? Look. Look. I’m calling my dad right now.”

<he calls his dad>
“Hey dad, how’s it going? Hey, I had a question about something: how do you make sun tea? …. Uh huh … uh huh ….. You leave it out for how long? Wait, wasn’t it a few days? I thought you … oh. Ok. Got it. Thanks dad... Yup, I’ll talk to you soon.”

“So??” I said, eagerly, cackling inside. 

“Uh. You leave it out for a few hours. He said leaving it out for a few days would be stupid.” 

I cackled so loud I almost split in two.

Let’s just say that that relationship didn’t last because I was not a very nice person. I've been working on it. 

But the conversation did demonstrate something I have noticed over and over - a blatant disregard for food safety in pretty much everyone I know. If you have an Asian parent, you grew up with this - rice is left in the rice cooker, soup is left out overnight, leftovers are simply covered up and left on the counter. The items in a mom’s fridge seem to last forever; the dishes that you swore you’ve already eaten for a week still living on in their little Tupperware kingdoms of immortality, jarred things from years ago still doing their thing in their jars. This legacy continues in us, their children. I think of this now as I discover a jar of iced tea that has been in the fridge undoubtedly for weeks, and my husband, the son of Chinese immigrants, assures me it is totally fine. 

It looks fine I guess, but remember, kids, you can't see bacteria. 

I believe many tummies have been sacrificed on the porcelain altar of “it’s totally fine.” 

I, on the other hand, demonstrate a healthy respect for our microorganism brethren. I constantly ask Google the question, "How long does [food item] last?” I diligently label newly-opened containers with the date. When in doubt, I throw it out. I even view moldy cheeses with suspicion, delicious as they are. In every instance, someone has reassured me that the subject of my concern is “totally fine.” 

When did I turn the corner, from unsuspecting rice leaver-outer to militant spoilage vigilante? I can tell you exactly when it happened: while doing cancer research in a biomolecular lab. In our lab, there were three areas set off for distinct purposes: the cold room, the warm room and the hot room. The cold room, as you suspect, was a giant room set at about fridge temperature where you could do experiments with proteins and gels and other things sensitive to heat. The hot room was not actually hot but where you dealt with radioactivity - there were special hoods and disposal containers, and you had to sign in and out every time you used it in case there was contamination.

Now the warm room actually was a very warm room, set to the temperature at which E. coli prosper and propagate. Kind of like a hippie music festival for bacteria, everyone making peace, love, and my cancer-gene protein while rocking out on a gently shaking platform.  I had to use this room every time I needed the “bugs” to grow me a batch of protein, and I’d put my GIANT erlenmeyer flasks, full of the little guys and their favorite soupy food, on the shakers and wait for them to do their thing. Since then, I've associated that temperature, 37 degrees C or about 99 degrees F, with that warm room and the sensation of the thick air crowding my reluctant nostrils with the euphoria of breeding bacteria. 

All three rooms were mildly unpleasant, but the warm room was my least favorite because of the smell. However, it did give me a very visceral sense of how bacteria multiply: how quickly they do it, what conditions they like, and how a liquid’s murkiness deepens as their numbers grow. And now I can’t help but see those conditions everywhere. For instance, after making a giant pot of homemade stock, those in the “it’s totally fine” camp might leave the pot out all day to cool before putting it in the fridge, or WORSE, just put it in the fridge (sacré bleu!!!). I can’t help but see in such a pot a giant bacterial Lollapalooza. I took my fears to the internet and found to my relief that, indeed, there are methods for taking a pot just off the boil and cooling it down in a jiffy. 

Now, you may well have picked your side, and from your side, you may well think I am a crazy person. And to that I’ll say: the food and drink purveyors of the world with any accountability are on my side. For example, if you look closely at Starbucks, every ingredient, every batch of liquid, is marked with a date and even time of expiry. In restaurants, there are a host of safeguards like inspections and food warmers and food coolers and inventory management. And even with these systems in place, shit happens (literally), like the E. coli outbreak at Chipotle, or like my first and last trip to a poke place downtown, where a friend and I ate a heap of raw fish and both spent an agonizing night in the bathroom, reflecting on how dysentery must be a terrible way to die. 

But, don't let me sway you. Everyone go ahead and do your own thing. Feel free to roll the dice, as thousands of our ancestors have (because I imagine scarcity left them no choice). As for me, I have the robust American food supply and the fear of the mighty microbe behind me, and I am going to throw out that iced tea right now. And a few other things. 

P.S. here’s a legit recipe for sun tea.
 

2017: Lessons from a Year in Blogging

After years of decamping to the Juilliard computer lab, I finally got my own work computer. And it is beeyooteefulll!

Happy new year! The running out of the calendar is a great reminder to stop our bustling about and sit down for some much needed introspection. My usual method of year-end reflection was to jot a short journal entry about memorable moments, triumphs, and disappointments, and then outline my upcoming goals. It was a crude method, but adequate to trigger the twinned emotions of closure and anticipation at year end.

Last year around this time, I started this blog instead. I had no idea what it would be about, but I had just launched my musician webpage and knew that it needed some “content,” fast. So I dubbed the blog “Jules of All Trades,” imagining that I would write articles full of tips, tricks, and hacks about everyday topics such as decluttering, good books, relationships, and cooking. You know, the usual. 

Instead, this blog morphed out of my hands into a very personal forum where I attempted, publicly, to process the events of 2017. Let’s face it: this year was tough in many ways, and there was no shortage of things to process. I didn’t expect to stray so far from my neat pile of mainstream blog topics, but I think it was the right choice. I once heard a powerful piece of advice from a law school mentor: when picking a legal research topic, start with what makes you angry or keeps us up at night. Most of the topics in my blog posts were spawned out of intense, irrepressible emotion, and that made the writing easier and more meaningful for me. 

So I kept it up, as much as I could. By the numbers, in 2017 I wrote: 

• 22 blog posts
• With an average of 1200 words each
• About every 19 days. 

It’s not much when you add it up that way, but over just one year, this little blog experiment has taught me so much. Here are just three lessons I've learned from blogging this year: 

1. Writing regularly improves your writing.

For those of you who are afraid to show your writing to the public, I’m with you. I’ve never considered myself a good writer, and my perfectionism means that I have written far more posts than I’ve posted. (It also means I often go back and edit entries after posting….). However, practice makes perfect, does it not? Also, I’ve been inspired to grow my writing skills even more this year by reading more. Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley in Search of America is up next. 

2. Writing in a public forum connects you with people, often unexpectedly.

When I started this blog, I had no readers. I was pretty sure it would stay that way forever, but three months later, I wrote an article (out of extreme frustration) about Betsy DeVos and what she taught me about my own learning journey. This article somehow was widely shared, getting over 2,300 hits that day!!! THAT’S A LOT OF PEOPLE I DON’T KNOW! The support from beyond my networks took me completely by surprise. I got emails through my website from strangers who had seen the article on Facebook or Twitter and wanted to share their own experiences with finding a growth mindset. I also heard from friends I hadn't talked to in years. It was an utterly amazing experience. 

So, heartened, I kept writing, especially when I felt a discomfort in my heart that needed soothing. The other top posts from this year ended up being:

"What I learned at Juilliard"
"What Is Privilege? On Cleaning Bathrooms At Harvard, And Harvey Weinstein"

Each one got hundreds of visits the same day that I posted them. Overall in 2017, I had over 12,000 page views from almost 7000 unique visitors. I know those numbers are insignificant in the world of high-rolling blogs, but to me, it was an overwhelming amount of human connection. The fact that people stayed engaged enough to read what I wrote, and that it meant enough to some to write me personally, made me feel heard and supported more than I could have hoped for. 

2017 site traffic

3. Writing with gratitude begets more gratitude.   

Being a natural-born realist (some would say pessimist) I have to be very careful not to ship the whole world to hell in a hand-basket anytime something makes me upset. Writing in a public forum provides me the accountability to try always to turn anger, frustration, and hurt into more helpful emotions, such as acceptance, learning, and above all, gratitude. Having this platform for working out my strong emotions to events this year was an immense blessing, because every time I resisted ranting and tried instead to find a more uplifting message, that positivity returned to me a hundred-fold, amplified by those it had traveled through before coming back to me. Gratitude, like any other habit, grows with practice, and this blog has given me an arena to keep up the practice. 

So. I guess what I’m trying to say is, THANK YOU. Thank you for reading, for the texts and emails and comments in person supporting this little project of mine. It has been one of the bright spots of 2017, and that’s because of all of you. Looking forward to 2018, I’ll try to write better, think deeper, and lift us all up higher, together.

Might I suggest that we all practice gratitude together? It puts us in control of our emotions (instead of the other way around) and readies us for the hard work that has to be done in 2018. There is much to be done. 

Happy new year all, and wishing everyone your best year ever. 

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