Yeah, I remember exactly that—I was in San Francisco, playing at a beautiful venue, and the siren of an ambulance came through, and it fit so well with the song that I started to play more to draw it out. I like to play in more noisy places so that I can take advantage of all the sounds helping me to build new things. But the one I remember the most is that siren in that venue. Sometimes I’ll play in venues where they’ll have coffee machines or milkshake machines—all these noises that I hated maybe five years ago—I love them now.

I just finished reading BJ Fogg's new book, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything. Fogg explains that the best way to build a new habit is to start small and succeed, rather than starting too big and giving up. For example, rather than trying to exercise for 30 minutes a day, he recommends aspiring to do just one push-up, and doing it consistently. This approach may be helpful to those of you who want to spend more time studying. If you hold yourself accountable for watching, say, 10 seconds of an educational video every day — and you do so consistently — the habit of studying daily will grow naturally.

But part of practicing to me is actually an active enjoyment. When people ask, “How much do you practice and do you like practice?” Well, I think it’s always getting your mind to go from “I should” to “I want.” It’s like the magic button that only you can locate. When you’re doing the “should” thing, time happens very slowly. Ugh, I’ve been practicing forever! Fifteen minutes. But when you want to do something, an hour has passed. Your control of time depends on whether you should do something or whether you want to do something.

No big challenge has ever been solved and no lasting improvement has ever been achieved unless people dare to try something different. Dare to think different.

I find that you’re a completely different person as a maker than you are as a listener. That’s one of the reasons I so often leave the studio to listen to things. A lot of people never leave the studio when they’re making something, so they’re always in that maker mode, screwdriving things in - adding, adding, adding. Because it seems like the right thing to be doing in that room. But it’s when you come out that you start to hear what you like.

I call it “stolen time”—there’s nothing more valuable than stolen time. It happens to me sometimes when I’ve set up a meeting at my studio at a certain time and it gets cancelled on short notice. When it happens, I’m like a giddy child. I think, “Wow, I’ve stolen half an hour. It’s so exciting—I can do whatever I want!”

My favorite method is stopping everything for a moment. It’s amazing how difficult I find it these days to simply sit quietly.