#100daysofpractice

#100daysofpractice is a social media challenge, where one commits publicly to practicing a craft and posting a video recording of something from each day’s practice session.

The concept of encouraging people to embrace unglamorous parts of the artistic craft on a daily basis for 100 days predates the social media challenge phenomenon. For example, Yale graphic design professor Michael Bierut wrote in 2011 about his five years of experience in assigning a “100 Day Project” assignment of repeating one design operation for 100 days.

Over the next few years, this idea became popular across online visual arts communities, leading to the emergence of #The100DayProject Instagram hashtag and various organizations offering services (free and paid alike) for gathering visual artists to partake in the challenge together.

In 2017, violinist Hilary Hahn made an Instagram post with a commitment “to posting a practice video every day till the global 100 days is up”, tagging the post with both #The100DayProject and #100daysofpractice.

The latter hashtag became popular among musicians, thanks not only to Hahn’s global fame but also her commitment to genuine vulnerability: “I make a point of not picking up the part of the practice that is impressive … I pick out the part that’s the actual work,” said Hahn in a 2023 New York Times interview.

Hahn is still the de-facto leading organizer of the #100daysofpractice challenge in the music community, regularly publishing Instagram posts geared towards providing structure and community support around musicians participating in the challenge each year.

Where do I come into all this? Despite being intimately familiar the power of disciplined regular work from my years in mathematics academia and having gone through nearly a decade of training on the piano, I had a rather poor relationship with musical instrument practicing. Much of my childhood musical training was oppressive and impersonal, which made practicing unpleasant despite my obvious love of music. Moreover, I was never taught how to make effective use of practice time.

My piano competencies expectedly atrophied once I no longer had the time and space to play the piano regularly. I did make a point of always keeping an electronic keyboard in my room in the intervening years, but I just wasn’t playing regularly enough. I eventually bought a piano thinking having an actual piano might help, but I ended up tinkering only with simple excerpts.

Sitting at the piano kept reminding me of all the pieces I could no longer play. It was frustrating to see what remains the largest single purchase of my life just sitting there in my living room, taking up precious space in an already-cramped NYC apartment. A voice in my head kept whispering: Do I not actually have what it takes to play music? Did I really spend all this money on an expensive furniture just to feel like I am something who I am not?

An unexpected change came in 2021, when a partial loss of my pitch perception abilities (a known symptom of aging) pushed me to start taking Ear Training classes at Juilliard Extension, a program I had been interested in for nearly a decade. The Ear Training classes offered weekly assignments with clear instructions on how and why to practice, as well as opportunities to perform the prepared exercises in front of a supportive group. Though piano was only a small part of the classes, the regular Ear training practice made me a better musician, a word I had long hesitated to use for myself.

By 2024, I had completed the third-year Ear Training sequence, the first optional year of Ear Training in a typical college-level music program. In other words, I had by this point more training on the subject than a substantial majority of conservatory-trained musicians, and I could no longer deny that maybe I do, in fact, know a thing or two about music. I started attending more musicians’ gatherings and practiced introducing myself as a music student, all the nagging self-doubt notwithstanding.

At one home concert in May 2024, I was introduced to a cello professor, who told me about her #100daysofpractice experience. She was doing it to encourage her students but was still benefiting a lot from the experience, she explained. I had heard of the social media challenge before, but this was the first time I had actually met someone doing it. If it is good enough for a music professor, I thought, what’s stopping me from trying it?

I didn’t do it for 8 months. I could say I needed to tackle a bunch of things to make such a commitment viable: stabilizing work environment volatility at the time that took months of active effort, coping with the increased courseload at Juilliard Extension after deciding to begin composition studies seriously, figuring out where I wanted to go with my piano studies, and so on. But, really, I think I was just afraid. The idea of posting unglamorous videos of my struggling through pieces I haven’t yet learned was terrifying.

And then it suddenly clicked. I wasn’t going to get as good as I wanted on the piano without daily (or, at least, near-daily) practice. I had never done a committed daily practice regimen in my life, and I certainly wasn’t going to learn how to do it well without trying it first. All this talk of making space in my life was good and all that. But, eventually, I needed to actually sit down and put in the work, whether I was ready or not.

On February 1, I made my Instagram account public and posted my first #100daysofpractice video. In retrospect, my statement of intent sounds a little grandiose, which was probably my attempt at covering up just how terrified I was at the time of trying this out:

I am trying out something new this year: the #100daysofpractice project, popularized by @violincase . The idea is simple: commit publicly to practicing a craft — musical performance for me here, directly mimicking Hilary Hahn’s original project — and posting something from each day’s practice session.

I’ve never been too fond of sharing my process publicly, preferring instead to publish only the results of many iterations. This discomfort has always been in direct conflict with my general attraction towards disciplines that require a lot of work behind the scenes, i.e., ones where the process is the craft. For the most part, however, I had been fortunate enough to have access to communities that let me air my dirty laundry in private, small-audience spaces. I hadn’t really had to interface with this particular internal conflict of mine.

But now, I want to get better at playing the piano, and I don’t have a close-knit community of pianists to tap into. I am using this as an opportunity to get out of my comfort zone a bit and try out a community-building exercise. (I even made my IG public for this experiment!)

So, here we are. I am posting something I’d normally find utterly embarrassing to publish. I am committing to do so for 99 more days. Let’s see what comes of this. (Day 1)

How did it go? Well, some days were tougher than the others:

I couldn’t really get the practice session off the ground today. Here’s a snippet. I am not even sure what I didn’t like that caused me to abandon the playthrough at the time for some of these. The process is just messy sometimes. (Day 31)

I feel quite silly today. Emboldened by yesterday’s progress, I set out to produce an error-free take of the prelude. I ended up getting fixated on the idea and spent THREE HOURS playing the piece on repeat, instead of a more targeted practice I had planned to do. Now my upper body aches, and I still don’t have an error-free take to show for. Ow. At least my fingers are more comfortable now, I suppose … (Day 45)

Some days, I just barely made it:

A week of starting work at 5AM and navigating the final week of the semester in the evenings has left me feeling worn-out. I crawled out of bed to get some semblance of daily practice in, but today’s session is understandably short and sloppy. I wasn’t able to focus on anything specific today; all I had in me was to play through the piece a few times. (Day 85)

Short practice session today. After a long week at work, I crashed and slept for a few hours. I woke up a little bit before the quiet hours and hurriedly put this together after a few playthroughs. (Day 99)

And sometimes, pushing through self-doubt was rewarded rather quickly:

These three measures were brutal. So many twists and turns, and demanding on the weaker fingers. I will admit I questioned whether I am actually ready to play this piece a few times during today’s practice session. But hey, I suppose a healthy dose of self-doubt isn’t too bad, so long as I don’t dwell in it. (Day 38)

I will admit I feel a little silly for having such a crisis of self-confidence yesterday, considering how well today’s (much shorter!) practice session went. I suppose some parts are just … more difficult than the others, and that’s OK. (Day 39)

Overall, though, I was able to keep to a daily regimen fairly well. I participated in the challenge from February 1, 2025 to May 17, 2025, skipping six days total:

• February 20 – February 23 (out-of-town trip)
• March 2 (evening event)
• April 2 (evening event)

Over time, I learned to make contingency plans in advance to still get the day’s practice in even when the schedule was packed:

Short practice session today. I will be out all evening, so I had to sneak it in before I left for work. (Day 90)

And, more importantly, I learned to be more comfortable with myself as a musician, and presenting myself as such:

This is also the last post of my #100daysofpractice series, which means I will no longer be posting daily practice videos. I will admit that I am relieved not to have to air my dirty laundry in public any longer. Nevertheless, this exercise was nothing short of a transformative experience. I learned a lot about discipline and the unreasonable effectiveness of incremental improvement, which I had thought I already understood well. I leave this experiment as a better musician — and a person, perhaps — ready to grow even more.

Did I successfully carry out the “community-building exercise” I set out to do on Day 1? I am not sure. But I did receive some nice encouragement both publicly and privately. I’ve had people I haven’t seen in a while telling me “I’ve been watching your piano videos”. I felt loved throughout this exercise, and, perhaps, that is better than whatever I was looking for on Day 1. (Day 100)

What more can I say? If you’re thinking about trying out #100daysofpractice, go for it. In Clarice Lispector’s words, this experiment “gave bit by bit a difficult joy; but it is called joy.”