Will power trumps all.

It was around 7 in the night. I picked up my violin to practice. Within 20 minutes into the practice, I got a strong feeling that I should stop playing. After getting that feeling, I could never concentrate on the playing. Couple of minutes later, I dropped it and moved onto something else. I always thought in order to get the best out of practice your immediate interest and will power should be aligned. Here, let me explain; whenever you do something there are two things at play, your will power and your immediate interest. Your will is what makes you take up a new activity. Your want to do something, be it dancing, painting, and playing guitar etc. is what will is. This will is unwavering. It won’t change unless you feel that activity is not working out for you. On the other hand, you have immediate interest which keeps changing from time to time and situation to situation. Sometimes, you feel the urge to do the activity. Sometimes, you are like, I’m not feeling like doing it today. That’s immediate interest.

When you mix these both you have four situations-

• Both will power and immediate interest are aligned positively.

                   This is when you want to take up an activity and you have the urge to do it right now. This is the most ideal condition which I think will contribute to the development of your skill in the activity. An example would be you want to paint and you feel like painting a butterfly and you go ahead and do it.

• Will power is positive but immediate interest is aligned negative.

                  This is what happens to me most of the time. I always wanted to play violin but I don’t find the time, I’m lazy or I just don’t have the right mindset to practice. I end up not doing anything and getting scolded for it by my teacher.

• Will power is negative but immediate interest is positive.

                  This I’m guessing happens when there is peer pressure. Like imagine your friends are planning a night out. You’re not interested to go out but you don’t want to miss out. You make up your mind to go and then figure out you actually had a better time than you expected.

• Will power and immediate interest both are negative.

                  One of the situations where I see this happening is when you badly want to make money. You work on a job you hate or something like that. Obviously I’m no one to tell but I advise you get out of this situation and pursue something your interests lie in.

The reason I laid out all these for you is because I wanted to talk about something that happened to me recently. After the usual reproach I got for not practicing enough, I came home. The next day, I took my violin, started practicing. After around 30 minutes I again got that same feeling. But instead of giving up, I relied on my will power to go on. I was working on a particular verse and I wasn’t getting it right. After trying a lot of times without much immediate interest something special happened. For one try, I got the verse perfect. Every note perfectly landed, every string perfectly bowed. I was at awe with myself. I spent the next 20 minutes trying to replicate that success, but in vain. I learnt one thing from this debacle. Will power trumps all. Even though I didn’t have the desire to continue I forced myself to continue and that produced a great result. I guess I finally understand Whiplash. When I watched that movie, I felt it was psychotic, both the student’s perseverance and the teacher’s pedagogy. But now I understand the value of will power. How even though Miles Teller’s character was severely injured he wanted to continue practice to get it perfect. I guess that’s the sort of dedication it takes to become someone great. That’s the lesson today. Even if your mind says no, force it to say yes on things that you have the will to do but not the immediate interest. The result will always be good. Hell, that’s what made me write this essay.