Minimum Valuable Input

Last night was the Super Bowl, and Chief’s QB Patrick Mahomes was awarded the MVP award, having been judged to be the most valuable player. This post is not about the MVP, it is about the MVI: the Minimum Valuable Input.

A few people have told me recently that they would like to practice guitar, but they don’t have time. They may well be right that they don’t have time to complete the amount of practice that they feel they would need to be as good as they want to be. But I think it is easy to overestimate how much you would have to do to make a real difference. A few years ago I started practicing my guitar while my coffee was brewing. This is just about enough time to play one song or do a couple of scales. But I did it pretty much every day, and it significantly improved my playing.

I’m sure that if I was trying to come up with an amount of time to practice guitar, I would have thought that it would take a lot longer, maybe 30 minutes. But then I might not get around to playing every day. If you practice guitar for 10 or 20 seconds, that might not be enough, but just a few minutes a day might be. It is far better than playing for a couple of hours every few months when you feel that you have “enough” time to play.

Malcolm Gladwell’s idea that it takes 10,000 to master something may be true, but for many skills it will take a whole lot less to make you good enough for what you need. A few minutes of focused practice a day for a year might be all you have time for, but it might be enough.

These blog posts are short and they don’t take me long to write. They may not be the best work that I am capable of, but they are making me better at writing consistently. They are also making writing a lot more fun than before when I have been writing for deadlines for school or work.

The most common question I get about blogging every day is whether am having a hard time coming up with ideas to write about, but the real answer is that writing this blog is giving me many more ideas than it is using up. Another bonus is that writing ideas down makes you understand them better and forces you to develop them further than you might otherwise.

So I’m going to try to find other areas where a minimum additional input can make me a lot better.