We are all distracted. The phones, the screens, the ads, the endless loop of videos, pictures, and sound bites—it never stops. It is easy to look at this constant noise and assume distraction is a modern disease born alongside the smartphone. But you would be wrong.
I remember the twentieth century, and it was exactly the same. Staying on task has always been a battle. Whether you were a child trapped in a classroom or an adult chained to a desk, your eyes inevitably drifted toward the clouds. Completing a task from A to Z without interruption felt nearly impossible because something was always clawing for your attention. Back then, I noticed that the people who could lock in and focus were the ones who landed good jobs and actually seemed to have their lives together.
I was not one of those people.
Staying interested in anything was a chore. I loved movies purely because they required zero effort; I could just switch off my brain and become a pair of eyes. Between the ages of 11 and 16, I drifted through life. My grades were terrible, I had no friends, and I constantsly clashed with my parents. Eventually, I was shipped off to boarding school, completely lost in my own fog.
Then came a miracle: I got my first drum kit.
Hallelujah! It sounds cliché to say it changed my life, but the truth is deeper than that: first, it changed my brain. I could actually feel it. Before drumming, my mind had been stuck on pause. Suddenly, in a rusty, clanking sort of way, the cogs began to turn. I started processing the world a little faster.
It was thrilling, but it was also deeply frustrating. The moment I picked up the sticks, I wanted to play like a god. I didn’t want to grind away learning the craft; I wanted instant mastery. But music had a different lesson in store for me: patience.
That was lesson number one, and it’s a concept I still fight to apply every single day. I have to trust that if I keep practicing, eventually—even if I don’t know when—I will get to where I want to be. Patience does not come naturally to me. I love our modern world, where a few keystrokes yield an answer in two seconds. In the eighties, that same search could take two months.
Yet, for all of us who struggle to stay on task, music remains the perfect antidote. It forces us to slow down, anchor ourselves, and focus. I cannot recommend it enough.
And with that said, I’m going to go practice.
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