Make sure that it is detailed. What techniques are you a master of? What songs can you play? What bands are you in? How many students do you teach? How does it feel when you play like you do?

Exercise Two: Now write down what areas of your playing you will need to start working on in order to reach your vision. What techniques do you need to start practising? What chords do you need to learn? What music theory do you need to start learning about? Do you need to start doing ear training? What books, teachers, CDs and other tools will help you realise your vision? How much time every day do you think you will need to practise in order to play like you want to play?

Exercise Three: Spend 10 minutes a day for next 30 days imagining yourself playing exactly how you would like to play. Do this with your eyes shut. Don't worry, it won't make you want to start eating tofu or go around neighborhood hugging trees! At end of every time you do this, write down one small new detail about your vision. By end of 30 days you should be feeling so excited that you'll want to practice 24/7!

Craig Bassett is a professional guitarist, guitar tutor and author from New Zealand.

I never saw Ralph Waldo Emerson, but I should say that John Bascom was a man of much his type, both in appearance and in character. He was embodiment of moral force and moral enthusiasm; and he was in advance of his time in feeling new social forces and in emphasizing new social responsibilities. His addresses to students on Sunday afternoons, together with his work in classroom, were among most important influences in my early life. It was his teaching, iterated and reiterated, of obligation of both university and students to mother state that may be said to have originated Wisconsin idea in education. He was forever telling us what state was doing for us and urging our return obligation not to use our education wholly for our own selfish benefit, but to return some service to state. That teaching animated and inspired hundreds of students who sat under John Bascom. The present President of university, Charles R. Van Hise, a classmate of mine, was one of men who has nobly handed down tradition and continued teaching of John Bascom.

In those days we did not so much get correct political and economic views, for there was then little teaching of sociology or political economy worthy name, but what we somehow did get, and largely from Bascom, was a proper attitude toward public affairs. And when all is said, this attitude is more important than any definite views a man may hold.