The Beatles had spectacular success in their day and a relationship developed between John, Paul, George and Ringo, which led to a wonderful flowering of creativity. It was a unique and unrepeatable mix of factors that caused this, but some of the fundamentals for their success may have come down to accidental, but massively effective, time usage.

In the early days of the Beatles, they went to Hamburg, Germany and played there for 2-extended periods that made up 6-months in total. During this time they played seven days a week for 6 to 7 hours each night. That makes up 42 to 49 hours a week. That was an intensive schedule and highly unusual. The average rock and roll band just starting out was probably doing a couple of 2-hour rehearsals a week, with a gig at the weekend. The average band probably put in about 6-hours of playing a week (and from my own limited experience of playing in bands, that’s quite a generous assumption). Consequently, the Beatles had 7-times (42 divided by 6) more playing and gigging experience per week than an average band. In the 6-months that they played in Hamburg, it can be argued that they got at least a 3 1/2 year experience advantage over a regular band. That alone would give a massive advantage, but there’s more.

When you engage in start/stop activities you don’t make efficient use of your time. It takes some time to build up momentum to do an activity and to get in the swing of things and when you stop, you lose some of that momentum. You have to consciously think about what you have to do from one session to the next. When you do things repetitively and consistently, you keep up the momentum and often build it further. It becomes much easier to move actions from conscious competence into unconscious competence and that frees up your consciousness to take on new activities and new learning. This leads to another advantage.

Once you transfer the bulk of activities to the level of unconscious competence, where no further new problem solving is required and little or no conscious thought is required to keep things going, you can then begin to experiment in parallel. Experimentation is a frustrating activity. You experiment because you don’t know what cause will give what effect. It requires a lot of trial and error to learn in this way. An average rock and roll band would have to focus predominantly on a basic level of performance. Without that, they would get no gigs, or else make a hash of things on stage. The Beatles would have established those basics quickly through the intensive scheduling of their performances. Off stage, they would not need to rehearse and so could focus on musical experimentation. With their basic skills finely honed they would then have the dexterity, showmanship, confidence and authority to introduce embellishments and even substantial changes to established songs.

Part of the Beatles great prowess and the reason that they stood head and shoulders above their peers came down to intensive training. This had the snowball effect of refining their skills and could have practically forced creativity upon them (they would have gotten bored otherwise).

You can use the same principle to learn quickly and to learn more effectively with many, many skills. For example, if you learn a language and go to a class once a week for 2-hours, then you have the problems of losing momentum in between. This delays the time to achieve well-honed skills. Over 3-months you would study for 24-hours. However, if you did a one-week intensive course, then you would get in the same amount of learning. More than that, you would build momentum and condition your basic skills through regular repetition. You would achieve unconscious competence much more swiftly. The quality of your results would be much higher overall. If you did a four week course, then you would get in 1-year of average experience.

For any skill that you want to learn, and especially new skills where building ability and momentum is the most difficult, use intensive training whenever you can. Be warned though: when other people see the rapidity of your results they might call you talented, or gifted, or lucky, or a genius - just like the Beatles.

It makes me wonder what other geniuses of music might be created if more bands put in 6-months of 7-days per week, 6-hours a night performing…

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