There's a YouTube cover musician I've been watching a lot of lately. He's by no means a virtuoso, or even particularly creative. Just a solid musician, who worked really hard at his craft for ten years and now has half a million subscribers.

For the longest time, I had the impression that his career was the optimistic version of what mine could have been if I'd focused solely on music since I was fifteen. But then I came across a video of *him* when he was fifteen, and he was basically as good as he is now!

So now I'm wondering: does practice even matter??

Like, you ever come across the super early work of an expert, expecting it will seem amateur, and find that actually it's just as impressive as the stuff they later became known for?

It's a point against growth mindset...

@mattyj612 and I were chatting about this today, swapping videos of each other playing music as teenagers. We realized that, actually, although we've both improved in many ways since then, in other ways we were *better* at age 15 than we are now.

Where we landed was that lifetime hours of practice is overrated as a determinant of skill. What often matters more is how much you've practiced in the past 12 months.

This is an optimistic realization, I think. It's not that that cover musician at age 15 just picked up his guitar one day and sounded great. It's that he had played a TON in the previous 12 months, so he sounded great when that video was recorded.

And then he continued to play a ton, for the next *120* months, while also improving as a performer and self-promoter.

So practice does matter, at least for maintaining skill. But for developing a career, the real differentiator is consistent investment in a particular activity.

A bit more riffing on this idea.

Look at Bieber, age 13:

He did not get there with a lifetime of diligent practice!

Ever listen to the album 'A Crow Looked At Me', by Mount Eerie?

1. It's the most moving artistic expression of grief I have ever encountered. (Recorded during the months after his wife died of cancer.)
2. It sounds exactly like his stuff from 15 years prior.

More great examples in this thread by @tjrwriting: https://twitter.com/tjrwriting/status/1177057439105114112