Question 1: How many books have you read recently that fall into the Personal Development, or Self Improvement, category?

Question 2: How much benefit have they since contributed directly to your life?

If you’re anything like I’ve been at times, your respective responses might be, “Dozens!” and, “Eh… not all that much.”

Why is that? Why have those resources, which you’ve invested so much money into and have so earnestly pored over, not manifested themselves into great things for your career, health and relationships? There are a number of possible reasons for this but the one I see most often in the lives of myself and acquaintances is the style of consumption.

A professional drummer by trade, I first started seeing this issue a handful of years ago with instructional drumming DVDs. I was looking through my jam-packed bookshelf of DVDs one day when it suddenly struck me that, although I’d watched all of them (many of them multiple times), the lessons taught therein had not infiltrated my playing. Sure I’d been inspired to play and practice upon every viewing, but that’s where it had all stopped. Perhaps I had subconsciously imagined that somehow, by osmosis, the incredible musicianship displayed by the virtuoso drummer on the screen would automagically permeate my being and turn me into a more highly-developed player myself. But nope… here I was, still wishing I had command of the library of rhythms, techniques and concepts that adorned the shelf in front of me. I had watched each and every one of the videos more or less for simply the entertainment value.

Rarely, if ever, had I hit the stop button immediately after a valuable exercise was introduced, racing off to the practice room to work on it for a few minutes — or hours — or weeks — before hitting play again to see what was next. Instead of gaining the desired ability myself, I settled for being impressed by his/her ability and then continuing wide-eyed and awestruck to the next exercise. Then the next. And, when that DVD was done, to the next one created by the next amazing drummer du jour.

It occurred to me that the same story applied to my stack (who am I kidding here… multiple stacks) of instructional drum books, as well.

Purchase. Peruse. Pass.

Consumerism = 100 points.

Musical growth = 0 points.

I’ll admit that my reaction to this realization was impulsive, but it was what worked for me: I immediately began getting rid of every single DVD. Most went home with students; others to the local library; one or two may have been used as frisbees at upcoming gigs.

Then began my process of starting over in a new way. I searched online through the myriad of instructional video options and chose one. Just one video, featuring one player whose style I wanted to draw from. When it arrived, I watched it in a way I had never watched one previously. After an introduction, he sat down at the drumkit and demonstrated his first exercise — a sequence of notes moved around the instrument as various tempos, so that someone like myself could see the slow breakdown of the pattern, as well as what it could sound like when mastered and up to full speed. Then I hit stop. I picked up the sticks, sat down at my own drums, and worked through each note he had just shown, at a painstakingly slow tempo. Over and over and over. With a metronome. Paying attention to technique and sound quality.

In short order, I had that pattern rocking! Not as fast and flawlessly as he had yet, but that didn’t matter. I was far closer to adding this new-to-me phrase to my usable musical vocabulary than I had been 30 minutes prior, and certainly closer than I’d ever been after my old “entertainment value” views in the past. Only after I reached a feeling of relative comfort with that pattern did I allow myself to go back and hit that play button again. This continued for weeks and weeks, until I had gradually worked my way through this one instructional video. Some lessons took a few minutes to get together; others took days on end. Although I didn’t come out sounding exactly like this mind-blowing idol afterward, I had developed all sorts of new colors for my percussive palette, and had the feeling of having gotten inside that player’s head a little bit, more deeply understanding the conceptual approach to his style on the instrument.