Right now reasons are things like, because I'm tired, or hungry, or I have a concert tomorrow. Right now reasons put out fires.
Later reasons are things like, because I want to be a good writer, a great guitarist, or someone who might resemble Jesus someday.
It's hard at first to think about later reasons, because the payoff is severely delayed; but as I go back and explore things I wrote before Myspace was popular, I see the distance I've travelled on the never ending road to excellence.
One of the hardest parts of my job as a guitar teacher is convincing people that great musicians are who they are today because they are people motivated by later reasons. Whereas the typical problem for my students is that the early stages of practice are simply going to be boring. Someday I'll figure out how to make it more fun than Halo, but for now it's just going to have to take self-discipline and vision.
To quote a teacher that I really never liked that much, "When God makes a squash he takes eight weeks, when he makes an oak tree he takes a hundred years."
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