Friday, February 16, 2007

Keeping Up Your Practice

The leadership guru, Peter Drucker, writes about the importance of practice in any discipline (communication, management, planning, prayer etc.):

"To every practice applies what my old piano teacher said tome in exasperation when I was a small boy: ‘You will never play Mozart the way Arthur Schnabel does, but there is no reason in the world why you should not play your scales the way he does!”

Peter Drucker adds, “What the piano teacher forgot to add—probably because it was so patently obvious to her—is that even the great pianists could not play Mozart as they do, unless they practiced their scales and kept on practicing them.”

Source: Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive, 19.

Image: Practising the piano.