Principles at work – Benjamin Franklin

There is a path leading from our own abilities to those of the greats in any chosen field. The path is easy to find if you know what to look for or how to find it. In other words, just finding out that someone studied a LOT more than you did doesn’t mean you can necessarily replicate their performance by simply studying more. You have to study right. A great example to follow is that of Benjamin Franklin, who ingeniously put the principles of deliberate practice to work:

Ben Franklin is considered one of the greatest writers of our country. He wasn’t born a great writer. He didn’t necessarily have a natural gift for it. What he did was develop it through the use of deliberate practice. This is a great example that clearly illustrates how it all works.

Remember the parts of Deliberate Practice

  1. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance (often w/ a teachers help)

  2. It can be repeated a lot

  3. Feedback on results is continuously available

  4. It is heavily demanding mentally or physically

  5. It isn’t much fun

We will see that after Ben’s father provided him feedback, Ben designed his own regimen specifically to improve his performance. He repeated the exercises a lot. They were mentally demanding, and odds are it wasn’t a lot of fun (though just like some musicians enjoy practice, Ben may have enjoyed the process too).

When he was a teenager, Ben and a friend were debating a topic in letters that they had mailed each other back and forth. Ben Franklin’s father found these letters, read them, and gave Ben feedback on them. He gave him, essentially the pros and cons of his efforts:

Pros

Bens letters were better in spelling and punctuation

Cons

- In elegance of expression the other guy was better

- in method the other guy was better

- in perspicuity (clear and easy to understand arguments) the other guy was better

So how did he address this? He developed a plan to build better writing skills, and in particular focus on areas where he was lacking. He also had a method for providing feedback on his results, even w/o his dad. That method was the original article that he worked from. It is illustrated below:

  1. He found examples of clearly superior writing to his own (from The Spectator – a well known, well written English “magazine” [think The New Yorker of its time, I guess])

a. He would read an article and make brief notes on the meaning of each sentence in the article.

b. He would wait a few days. Then he would look at his notes, and try to write an article from those notes in his own words (IOW, he was not trying to remember how the article was written, but simply figuring out a way to simulate as if he had originally written the article).

c. He would then compare the original article with the one he wrote.

d. He then discovered some of his faults and corrected them.

  1. One of his faults was a poor vocabulary. This is what he did to remedy that:

a. He knew that writing poetry required an extensive vocabulary

b. So he would then rewrite the articles in verse

c. After he had forgotten them, he would take his verse versions and rewrite them in prose (normal writing). This helped strengthen his vocabulary (writing in verse) and allowed him to also reinterpret that verse into normal writing. IOW, the prose took the place of the notes on the meaning of each sentence in #1a above.

  1. He realized one of the elements of a good essay is its organization. So to improve upon that he:

a. He would make short notes on each sentence in an essay, with each note on a separate piece of paper.

b. He would then mix them up and put them away for weeks.

c. Then he would use his organizational skills to try to put the notes together in the proper order – IOW, he did NOT try to remember the org structure of the article. He used his own.

d. He would then compare it with the original.

e. He discovered his faults in this area, and worked on fixing them.

So you see, he found his areas of weakness and specifically addressed those areas. He did not try to become a better essay writer by simply writing a lot of essays. He just worked over and over on the areas that needed improvement (sentence structure, vocabulary, and organization).

Ben Franklin did this, and did it diligently. It was a lot of work, and he followed through and did it! He practiced before work in the morning, in the evening when he got home, and on the weekends. Ben eventually became one of the most influential writers of his era.

Lets translate some of this to music. Lets say you have a small piece of music. Lets say you want to improve your jazz guitar playing over the standard ii-V-I progression. You listen to an unfamiliar recording of Grant Green playing guitar over it (that would be the article). So you take notes on his playing. Something like:

ii chord – he plays a short repeated phrase based off of the dorian scale.

V chord – he plays a dominant 7 arpeggio for the first ¾ of the duration of the chord, and a descending line for the last ¼ of the duration, based upon a bV arpeggio, and on the I chord, he plays a major pentatonic lick.

Now you would take the progression, and play your own licks according to your notes. Then you compare his solo with yours. In what ways is his better than yours? Is he technically better (faster)? Do his arpeggios sound more natural (not so sequenced)? Is his repeated phrase much more melodic that what you played? Etc.