The Inner Game of Music

"Yes, this book is relevant to anyone who wants to specialise in anything that is complicated and hard. His method of guiding you through the way of focusing on your training and how you practise is basically a guide on the craft of training. And that takes away the myth that talent has much to do with anything. I think that is helpful to anyone who wants to get better. I used his book The Inner Game of Tennis for my training, which is very similar but broader because it puts the aspect of sports into music. Yes, there was a study done at the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm which looked at the connection between talent and training. They compared three different levels of artists when they had graduated. Those that were fantastic and soloist material, those that were mediocre and those that were sort of in between. There was nothing in terms of talent that linked them together. All of these three groups had equal numbers of talented and non-talented when they started. The only thing that was equal among the best when they had graduated was that they had practised the most. They had at least 10,000 hours of practice and in the worst group there were just as many talented in the beginning of the study but they hadn’t put in the time."