M2M Day 224: This is not the story I expected to write today…
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For June, my goal is to develop perfect pitch.
Today, I regressed (or, at least, that’s what I thought).
Throughout the day, I practiced identifying notes with very little success. It was almost frustrating how inaccurate I was.
I’m not sure if this was because of my poor night sleep last night, or just brain overload in general, but this was the first day where it seemed that I got unilaterally worse.
On the bright side, this kink in my linear progress makes for a more compelling narrative anyway, so I figured I would lean into it: My plan was to come home, film myself struggling, emphasize this struggle as a plot point, and move on to tomorrow.
Yet, something different happen.
When I got home, I opened my computer and headed to Toned Ear, ready to film my session. I decided, in order to really emphasis my struggle, I would enable all twelve notes as possible options, ensuring that I would flounder.
But then, through some kind of mystical alignment of the perfect pitch stars, I correctly identified 85% of the notes (17 out of 20).
While this was exciting, I was a bit disappointed: I was mentally prepared to write about today’s failure. This better-than-expected performance completely ruined my narrative arc.
So, I figured I would just film another session. After all, my first performance was probably just lucky.
But then… I identified 80% of the notes correctly. A slight dip (so I was getting closer… to being bad), but still, this performance was not going to serve my narrative.
Finally, on my third attempt, I was able to score a not-so-impressive 12 out of 20 notes.
So ignoring the first two sessions, I can finally paint the narrative that I was hoping for: I’m struggling, and I’m just not sure if I can pull myself together in the next few weeks. This is a serious uphill battle.
With the drama now out of the way, I can say, in all seriousness, that I’m quite excited by my results this evening. I truthfully struggled during the day, but once I was back in my quiet apartment, I was able to fully focus and perform at the edge of my training.
Clearly, I’m still inconsistent (and I was likely a bit lucky today as well… in terms of what I caught on camera), but the results are promising.
There’s some important commentary about the videos that I want to share, but I’ll save that for tomorrow.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.