Here’s the free download for this video - the show notes.
The year was 20…13? 20..14?
Nate was trying to figure out what to do with his life, but suspected there was another way to teach drums.
Then, I saw this video: Optimization Dude using the 80/20 rule to shortcut the drums.
I’d already made stabs in that direction with my fledgling channel.
But this video came out, and I was like “he stole my idea.”
Since then, it’s hard to say how much influence Tim Ferriss and his experiment to play drums in concert with Foreigner in one week had - was I conducting all sorts of “guinea pig” experiments to learn things in compressed amounts of time because of Tim, or was it just “in the air” among YouTubers?
As the years went on, though, that original video was less and less on my conscious mind, as the count of my videos ticked into the hundreds, and I’d run so many experiments and taught so many students I was forming my own relationship with teaching, learning, drums, and 8020.
By the time Tim re-released his original “learn drums fast” video 2 weeks ago, I’d been at it for around a decade.
Which prompted an idea I couldn’t resist: compare Tim’s approach in the original to where my thinking has settled after 10 years. And I discovered something surprising to probably only me: a lot of the ideas in Tim’s original video, while they might have worked for Tim in one extremely specific scenario…
…are probably either next-to-worthless for intermediate drummers who already practice every day, or things we already know.
To examine why, I backtrack and get into super-nerd territory. 8020, and Pareto, its inventor, aren’t just “get more from less”; they refer to a very specific statistical distribution, that’s not true of all things.
So I ask - is it true of drums?
And if it’s not, does that mean there’s no advantage to be gained from better teaching or practice?
Neither extreme passes the sniff test.
Instead of Tim, my recent thinking has settled closer to that of another thinker who influenced me heavily - Anders Ericsson: he of the 10,000-hour rule.
But in the video, I examine what “real life” accelerated-progress looks like.
Know you’ll enjoy.
And in case you missed it, I want to share the video I’m most proud of from 2024, the video I worked hardest on, and also the one that got definitively the fewest views.
Feel guilty enough to watch?
It’s the vlog of my clinic tour this past November.
Enjoy, and see you soon!