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When we reached the pier, Steve was waiting there along with a group of fishermen and a handful of locals and tourists. Steve said that one of the fishermen on an offshore boat thought he had sighted the mother whale near one of the oil rigs. The oil rig was about a mile and a half offshore and it was almost in a direct line with the pier. I had swum out there only once before, during an open-water race, but at that time, I had had a paddler with me on a long paddleboard. He had helped me stay on course, and he had watched for danger. But the baby whale had already turned and started to head offshore. He looked over at me as if to say, Please come swim with me. I knew it made no sense to follow him. I could think of many reasons why I couldn’t or shouldn’t, but I didn’t want him to go off alone. Sometimes things just don’t make sense, sometimes there’s no reason to explain how or why I wanted to do them; I only knew that I had to, I had to try. Without trying I would never know what could happen. It was like reading a great mystery and never knowing how it finished, always wondering who did it. Sometimes the things that make the least sense to other people are the ones that make the most sense to me. Maybe I knew this, too, because I didn’t always fit in. I was shy and large, and I believed that I had to work hard and study hard to do well. I had different friends—from computer wizards to the guys on the water polo team and the girls on the swim team to friends in drama and music—but I didn’t fit into any one group. I had things I knew I wanted to do and didn’t play the teenage boy and girl games. I was more interested in studying people who had been leaders, made discoveries, or explored, men and women who were always going against established thought. It was always difficult to swim against the tide, doing something new or different, because the ideas that could result might cause something to change. Many people are happy with things as they are. They are comfortable with what they already know. But if I didn’t move outside my comfort level, how would I ever experience anything new, how would I ever learn, or see or explore? I believe that each of us has a purpose for being here, that we have certain gifts and certain challenges we need to learn from and fulfill for our lives to have meaning and richness. “I’m going to swim with him,” I shouted to Steve.
As musicians, no matter what we’re trying to do, we are multitasking, because our body and our ears and our fingers are involved in a number of things while we’re learning. When I get the most done and I have the best practice time it’s when I really isolate an area of the music I need to work on. Before you start, take a moment to go over what you want to accomplish. Identify the most challenging parts of the music and focus only on those, not the whole song. This is a common mistake beginners make. Forget the easy stuff. You’re after efficiency, and this means tackling the tough stuff. Don’t waste your energy on what you already know how to play. Sure, it’s fun, but the clock’s ticking.
The Practice of Practice
Jonathan Harnum
In looking back, Steve Kerr recalled his favorite memory of Jordan and his final Bulls team. It involved a typical Phil Jackson assignment for his players as the 1998 regular season came to a close. “Phil had this great moment,” Kerr explained. “It was the last day of the regular season and he told us, ‘Tomorrow, at practice, I want everybody to write down a few words about this experience you’ve had with this team. It can be anything, you can write a poem. You can just write a letter to your teammates. You can take some lyrics from a song that are meaningful. Whatever. But bring something tomorrow.’ Half the guys brought stuff, about half the guys forgot. I forgot. But Michael brought something and it was a poem that he wrote about the team.” It was the ultimate triumph of Jackson’s effort over the years. Jordan, the game’s angry man and all-time badass, had written a poem. “It was shocking,” Kerr recalled. “What happened was, every guy ended up saying something, whether they read something or said something. Phil told me later that June, his wife, had told him about this and suggested the idea. And so what he did was after each guy spoke, whoever had written something down had to crumple up the paper and put it into a big coffee can. It was like a Folgers can. Then when everybody was done, he lit a match and he lit the contents on fire in the coffee can. The lights were out and there was this glow in the room. And it was like, ‘All those memories that you guys just talked about, those are ours and nobody else is gonna see.’ He didn’t say that, but it was the metaphor. This is ours and they’re gone and they’ll forever live within us and nobody else will ever see ’em.” Phil Jackson burned Michael’s poem?! “I know, that thing would be worth millions right now, right?” Kerr said, laughing at the memory. “Michael’s poem was, what does this mean to you? What does this experience mean to you and where have you been and where are you going? It was so cool. In a legacy of powerful moments that Phil, you know, left with us, that was by far the most powerful one. I’ll never forget it. I was crying. A lot of guys were shedding tears.”
Michael Jordan
Roland Lazenby
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