When one is a musician there is a lot of talk about forming habits, and the difference between good ones and bad ones.  

However, The Lightbulb Moment for me this week can be summed up in a few simple words: Habits, good or bad, have more to do with what you do inside with your head and heart than what you do outside with your hands. 

You can say, for example, that you play the piano well, but that is not quite the same thing as saying you are a pianist. The first has to do with what you want to achieve. The other has to do with what you want to become.

Good habits need to center around not just a commitment to change something in our lives, but instead changing our identity. Saying one plays the piano implies having adopted a series of tasks or exercises that allow one to achieve a particular goal. Saying one is a pianist however suggests that a person has centered their lives around incorporating all that is needed to both achieve and sustain that goal. 

Identity-based habits, according to James Clear, are those that change not the outside, but the inside. They are the ones that redefine how we think of ourselves as people. When Lady Gaga was preparing for the role of Patrizia Reggiani in House of Gucci, she did not just adopt the habit of learning her lines and being ready when the cameras were rolling. Instead, she became Patrizia Reggiani; preparing for eighteen months even before filming began; speaking with an Italian accent everywhere she went and with everyone she met, even family members and close friends, for nine months; looking at archival footage along with photographs and media reports to understand as much of Reggiani’s life as possible. She even looked back into her own Italian heritage in order to act with an Italian mindset. In other words, Lady Gaga changed herself from the inside out. She was not Lady Gaga playing Reggiani.  She was Reggiani.

The mindset of a truly great artist does not rely on just adopting certain habits, but instead requires one to internally become the thing he wants to achieve. Adoption of habits is not the same as incorporating principles, attitudes and ideas leading to habits that make the external goals easier to accomplish.

When Cécile Chaminade was denied admission to the Paris Conservatory because she was a woman, she could have let that moment define the whole of her ambition. Instead, she studied privately and eventually became a legendary pianist and composer. In other words, she was not defined by externals, but by how she identified with the world inside herself.

It is not enough then to want to play the work of a great composer well, practicing hour upon hour every day until all the notes are learned and the piece is played without any errors. True greatness, true mastery comes with assuming the identity of someone who wants to know more about the composer and why he chose to put on paper the notes and chords he did to form the work. It involves a mentality that does not stop once the piece has been fully memorized, but instead starts with an internal attitude that questions what each note has to say and why.  

Playing a great piano is not at all the same thing as being a great pianist, no matter how well you play. To be a great pianist is to commit internally to a mechanism of discovery that doesn’t stop once the piece has been learned. In fact, for a true pianist or a great artist of any kind, that is just the beginning.

Ask yourself then whether you want to be great at playing the piano, or do you want to be a great pianist? You’ll find they are two different questions with two very different answers, requiring two entirely different sets of habits.