Motivation! The art of getting off your dead butt and doing something, and/or getting others to do the same. It sounds like I’m setting up some grand exposition of that, but I don’t have any such thing, I’m just writing some stuff.
This is how we do it though:
Usually the thing itself is the motivation— if you can get yourself to simply start, you get involved in doing it, and the thing demands that you continue with it, and work on it until it’s in some state of… finish? Improvement? Maybe until it feels like a reasonable period of work has been satisfied. All that’s required is that you start, but it can be really hard to start. What I do is sit down at the drums and pick up the sticks and hit something.
Or pick up the brush to paint something, or starting typing to write something. That starts the conversation. You can’t wait until you feel like doing it, or feel inspired, or have an idea. You feel like doing it after you start, you get ideas after you start. You can give yourself some impetus to start by making some arbitrary rules, setting a time of day at which you pick up the sticks and hit a drum for at least, say, one minute. If doing that consistently is a problem, you can enforce it with an arbitrary statement like “This is what I do.”
I’m assuming we share a fundamental way of regarding what we do, where one note leads to another note. A note is not just a thing that happened, it’s the beginning of a statement. When you hit a drum, you’re saying:
“Once…”
To which the response is: “Yes, and? Once what?” That leads you to play more.
If you just hear:
“whap”
The response is: “OK, there was a noise there. I guess we’re done.” [leaves the room]
A lot of us approach practice as a strictly mechanical exercise— we were indoctrinated to the approach from day one, via Stick Control: play each pattern 20 times without stopping, then go on to the next one. A certain amount of that kind of practice may be necessary or useful, if it’s your primary way of relating to the instrument, of course you’re going to be easily demotivated. A push up does not demand another push up, a push up is a very attractive invitation to stop doing push ups.
We also need to have some kind of concept, an idea of the terrain of this instrument. Having a vague idea or no idea of what to do is, of course, demotivating. Usually you learn by doing it in a supervised setting— drum lessons, school band, drum corps— you figure out your playing needs, what there is to play, how to develop it. Many in those settings are not using the supervised time to figure out a concept, they’re just getting good at being told what to do all the time.
Possibly many more casual drummers are used to a YouTuber/hack style of teaching, where they are fed a trickle of isolated licks or “techniques” or “parts” to songs, a method of teaching specifically intended to not help you form a concept, but to make you a permanent consumer of their product.
I teach the terrain— as broad an understanding of the materials, and how to handle them, as is practical. It takes some time to communicate that, but when someone is well grounded in it, they have some control over their fate, they’ll know what they do when the feel like working on some aspect of their playing. They can make intelligent decisions about what kind of playing limitations they’re going to allow in themselves.
For some learning the full scope of the task can also be demotivating, because it seems insurmountably huge. That’s where we point out that this is a years, or decades, or life-long process, and that we’re teaching this so someone can guide themselves through their coming decades of playing this instrument. You don’t go to the library and panic because of all the books you’re failing to read, you’re happy because you have a resource that will be there to draw from when you need it.
There also needs to be an interest. I’ve had students who were doing lessons as assignments, and were capable at doing that, and had no interest in music beyond that. That’s not going to work. There needs to be some kind of emotional need— a love of music, love of playing, a need to express something, or to perform; or an intellectual interest, or a need to prove oneself. Some combination thereof.
I’m not sure that kind of interest can be taught. All we can do is be a good example, and show people some music, and hope that they connect, and find a motive for a musical life.
A bleak assessment of these modern times is that people are so used to having their engagement gland palpated by apps and video games and inflammatory media calculatedly designed to be addictive, that their ability to engage doing real things is stunted— the glandular rewards of doing real things are too weak to compete with that. I’m not sure that’s true. There are any number of non-inflammatory, slow-reward activities engaged in regularly by large numbers of humans— their rewards are actually more powerful than the momentary inflammation the screens give us. In any case, it has always been that a fairly small number of people learn to really engage with making music.
If you have professional aspirations, a desire to not end up digging ditches can be powerful motivation. You can impress your more ambitious students that that is what will happen to them if they don’t work harder. Hopefully you are around other drummers with whom you feel some constructively competitive instinct— a desire to not feel like a lame ass for not being able to play as well as them, or better.
Traditionally fear is the single motivational tool used at all levels of this activity— fear of getting yelled at by your drum teacher, fear of getting embarrassed in class. I’m not sure what is the goal of much of it. It can be effective for meeting some kind of short term performance goal. I’ve seen it used on some more talented student players developing ego problems— thinking they’re more accomplished than they are— to keep them focused on the job. Probably it’s useful for maintaining discipline within groups.
On an individual basis, I don’t think it’s to any great long term benefit. Your job is not to mold someone lukewarm about music into a career performer, or turn them off and drive them out of music altogether in the effort.
Ultimately none of the force methods work in the long term. Certainly they don’t make anyone happier. Look for natural motivation— that comes through love, interest, intellectual engagement, a natural desire to complete things started.