Prologue

If you were to open up my iPad right now, the first thing you would see is not a library jam-packed with thousands of songs. It would not be a facebook page, nor a chess game, nor any one of the various Wikipedia apps I've tried in the months that I've had this ubiquitous rectangle. No, instead you would see a spreadsheet filled with rows and rows of numbers. Across the top, you would see the days of the week, and in the bottom right, far removed from the pack, "143.5".

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A few months ago, I was sitting at a desk in Cambridge, Massachusetts, typing up solutions for a calculus textbook. At the time, I was working at the illustriously-titled Worldwide Center of Mathematics. I always thought it was a bit of a misnomer considering that we were just five dudes sitting around in an office in Cambridge, though one of the guys working there was fresh-off-the-boat Irish. I was staring at one particular exercise that had been vexing me for days, when in a moment of pure frustration, I walked over to my whiteboard, grabbed a marker, and started writing without thinking. "There is no clearer indication that I am not cut out for grad school than my complete lack of ability and lack of interest in this problem. I was put on this planet to make music." I stepped back and took a few moments to stare at what I had just written. It felt very right, very natural, and very important. For once, everything seemed crystal clear to me.

The weeks that followed this epiphany were highly productive, at least from a musical standpoint. Every single day, I practiced guitar for at least an hour, though typically I was cranking out three hours per day and more on the weekends. I would sometimes wake up early to practice before work if I knew I wouldn't have time afterwards. On top of this, I spent countless hours meticulously transcribing and cataloging every song I had written that had not yet been buried in the sands of time.

All of this effort was at first put forth without a particular goal in mind, just the idea that as long as I continued to pour myself into my music, something good would come of it. Some might call this blind devotion "faith". I call it "being a stubborn motherfucker." However, through an implausibly random connection, I came into contact with a sound engineer who was willing to record my stuff for a mere $25 per song. I pounced on the opportunity, and we spent a few weekends laying down tracks and mixing in a tiny room in Allston. When all was said and done, I had given Tyler $450 and one cheeseburger for his services, and for the very first time in my life, I felt absolutely great about the money I was spending.

As my internship at the Center of Math came to a close, my enthusiasm for working there dwindled. That's something no one ever tells you as a kid: having an epiphany and discovering one's purpose is great, but it makes all non-epiphany-related activities seem totally trivial by comparison. Regardless, I finished up my term as the Associate Director of Math Content (not my idea. I wanted to be called "Reverend of Punctuation"), then headed back home to Connecticut with 14 sexular recordings and the determination to make the most of my summer.

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June 26, 2011, marks the beginning of Week 1 in my practice log. As with my initial spurt of musical productivity, I created the spreadsheet without any particular goal in mind. However, a few days ago, as I was looking at the weekly totals column, one clear objective popped into my head: 1000 hours in 52 weeks. I made it my mission that by midnight on June 23, 2012, I will have logged at least 1000 hours in that spreadsheet.

As I start working away at Week 7, my current total is 143.5 hours, way ahead of the 120 that I would need to be on pace for 1000 by the end of Week 52. I've still got a few glorious weeks of summer to squeeze in as much playing as is humanly possible. However, I don't imagine that it will be easy to find time to practice 20 hours per week when I'm a full-time student with a part-time job writing calculus textbooks. Will I be able to keep up the pace once I head back to Boston? Time will tell.