PRESENCE - Volume 73
Inspiration For Guitarists
I woke up Friday morning in a panic.
I'm an early riser now — I used to be a night owl back in my bar gig days, playing late nights and sleeping in. These days I'm usually up by 6:00 without an alarm. Friday was no different. Coffee, laptop, the usual routine.
Then the emails started coming in.
Students couldn't access the Essential Skills Course. I tried to login myself and got hit with a "504 Gateway Time-out" message. Stomach in knots.
I checked the ThriveCart status page — ThriveCart is the platform where the course is hosted — and saw this:
"The outage was triggered by an unscheduled database upgrade performed by AWS on our primary production database."
I won't pretend I know exactly what that means. What I do know is they were fixing something and the course would be back up shortly. I dug into their incident history and found that ThriveCart goes down maybe once or twice a year for an hour or two. That's about as reliable as it gets.
Sure enough, it was back up within a couple of hours. What a relief.
Once I'd responded to everyone and the dust settled, I started thinking about something. The emails I woke up to weren't angry. They were from people who had sat down early on a Friday morning, ready to practice. They were frustrated because they actually wanted to be in the course.
That really hit me.
The feeling that came over me was hard to describe — somewhere between gratitude and inspiration. The fact that so many people have trusted me to help guide their guitar journey, and they're actually showing up for it. Early mornings. Fridays. That's the whole reason I do this.
All the work that goes into creating this stuff — the videos, the practice tracks, the course — knowing that it's genuinely helping people improve and have fun while doing it makes every bit of it worth it.
-Dustin
P.S. If you want to be the kind of player who shows up on a Friday morning to practice, the course is here -
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