One major problem most musician's face is option anxiety.

What happens is they get so excited about learning and they go down a rabbit hole of instructional videos, books, and other educational material. They study so much at one time yet retain almost nothing. They did everything they wanted to do, but left out one important step.

They never reflected on what they learned!

Without Reflection, Nothing Else Matters!

What point is there to learning if none of the information sticks?

We all have the ability now to learn anything we want, whenever we want, from whomever we want. The question we should ask though is, How effective is that as a form of education?

From my own personal experience, I know that I have logged plenty of hours watching educational material both for learning more about guitar and for starting my business. It is beyond frustrating when you know that you studied a topic and then can only recall part of the information. At that point, you simply have to admit, you are doing too much and trying too hard! Our minds are created to learn through a process and execute the task after the process is complete, not to stay in a perpetual state of "oh how did that work again?" My main point is that you "learn" so that you can "do" and that takes narrowing down the educational material you use to the best that you can find and then reflecting on it!

Your learning process should start with a goal or "the end in mind" as stephen covey says in "7 habits of highly effective people." From there it is just connecting the dots between what you already know and what you want to know. The final step in that whole process is reflection which internalizes the information and makes it stick!

Reflection is the final step in the learning process and the one that a lot of people overlook.

Let's go through that learning process together!

1. Pick a small amount of material such as a song or part of a song, or a few chords or a scale.

2. Work out the material to the best of your current ability, not to necessarily perfect it, but to just grow your level of ability with the understanding that you can always refine it further later if you want.

3. Create something with your new level of knowledge, because creating with the material gives your creativity depth and dimension.

4. Reflect on what you learned, literally let your mind remember and feel over and over what it was like to play and learn that material to reinforce and round out the learning process.

With the understanding that music knowledge and learning guitar is a finite process, you can learn all you want to know and develop the ability to play the things you want to play.

I'm not saying there isn't a lot to learn in music, but I am saying there is less than you think and I am also saying that you don't have to learn it all, just learn the ideas and concepts that teach you the things you want to learn.

When you become intentional about learning a subject and focus deliberately on it and finish the process by reflecting on that time, you make your learning process so much more potent and effective!