Welcome, new readers to my blog post and I hope to keep you entertained with fresh ideas related to guitar and music.

I will try to post every week and of course, will try to keep them as interesting and interactive as possible.

GUITAR. The moment we hear this word, we immediately seize to think about a handsome man, a rebel punk, or even in some cases, a beautiful woman elegantly charming everyone by her magnificent playing and her gorgeous looks.

But let’s look on the other side of the coin, have you ever pictured yourself playing that beautiful instrument? Chances are, yes.

Then why can’t we stay motivated and inspired to play this instrument or start to learn this instrument? And what if we do, how it will benefit us? Let’s try to answer these queries one by one.

What’s the most common picture we paint in our imagination?

Beautiful sky, bright sunny day, soft breeze swirling in the everglades and you are playing your guitar with your better half or your crush by your side and just feeling the music and the ambience around you.

Or in some cases, a stadium filled with 100,000 people, while you arrive in your precious Ferrari and making it onto the stage. With one fist raised, the crowd goes wild and you start to play in all your glory.

Or perhaps, you had a bad day, a really bad day, girlfriend broke up with you, you had a tough day at the office, your pizza came delivered cold.

And the only thing that can cheer you up now is your favourite six-string and a nice cup of coffee.

These scenarios are only limited to our imagination. But somewhere deep down, we all want to connect ourselves with a musical instrument. Guilty as charged.

So why can’t we stay motivated and inspired?

Let’s face it. We all are insecure about something in some amount. But we all are commonly insecure about failure and what people think about us as we fail.

So whenever, we are faced with trying something new, we immediately hesitate or back out from that opportunity. Because we are simply afraid to fail and we are scared to face other people’s opinion.

Another great reason is that we all love the fruits of our work, but we simply don’t want to work for it. We always see the far-fetched end result, but never the process or the methodology involved in achieving that vision.

Nobody wants to go under the countless, painful, long hours of practice sessions just to learn a few lines of “happy birthday”.

Instead, we want to pick up the guitar one day and tomorrow see ourselves performing in a stadium full of people. That’s not the reality.

We should have the willpower and the commitment to play the guitar before the day ends. It’s about letting go of the vicious circle of insecurity lethargy, demotivation and giving up.

What if we actually started playing?

So finally, the day has come when we broke the chains, picked up that six-string guitar we saw gathering dust in our cupboard and started learning the guitar.

We are ready for the long practices, we are ready to make our fingers bleed (summer of ’69 reference here) and we are ready to commit to play until we learn that song from our favourite artist.

That is a really great start and I congratulate you for finally taking the stand for yourself and overcoming your insecurities.

But I am not motivated enough…

If you consistently practise each day for at least 20 minutes. Months will pass by, you will slowly get accustomed to the harsh steel strings as your fingertips will start developing callouses.

In order to achieve the above, you must set a goal each day and segragate your practise routine into several small time-intervals.

A standard 20 minute guitar practise routine should be based on the following:

• 5 minute – warmup, get those fingers ready.
• 5 minute – playing your favourite song or attempting to play it.
• 5 minute – learning something new, be it chords, scales, guitar riffs or guitar licks.
• 5 minute – experimenting with what you have learned and trying to make music out of it.

With each practice session, your muscle memory will get stronger, resulting in increase in your dexterity and multitasking abilities.

By the time you have learnt a song, you have developed:

• a sharper memory,
• a lot of patience,
• a better analytical mind and come up with innovative ways of addressing your problems.

All this will help you:

• work better,
• increase your productivity at work and best of all,
• will help you reduce your daily stress level.

Mentally, you will be a changed person, calm, composed, patient and now with better intellect.

Who knows, if you get lucky, you might be able to turn that rockstar imagination into reality.

Conclusion

Playing the guitar is a lot of fun. It also requires a lot of willpower, commitment and hardwork to achieve whatever you have set as your goal.

Guitar and music is never ending journey and it will continue to challenge you each time you think you have conquered the guitar.

However, it’s upto the guitarist’s will-power, determination and integrity as to how much he/she can push itself.

Thus, I wanted to convey the importance of playing a musical instrument as part of our lifestyle. Being a guitarist, I have experienced the above and thus, inspired me to write this article.

Thanks for reading it and please do leave your feedback and critique. Until next time.