How to Practice

Looking back throughout my life when I’ve tried to learn new skills, I’ve realized that I hadn’t been practicing in the most effective way, so my success was limited and progress slower than I’d expected. It was only recently in starting to learn to play guitar from Justin Guitar (www.justinguitar.com) that I started to appreciate more effective ways to practice. In fact, Justin has a whole area of his website devoted to practicing, though he also mentions some of these throughout his tutorials. A few key lessons from Justin stand out for me:

  1. Set goals regarding what you want to achieve and why – this helps motivate you, especially when practice gets boring or you are trying to figure out how to do something really difficult.
  2. “Practice makes permanent.” Note he says “PERMANENT”, not “perfect”! It means that whatever you practice will be ingrained and retained…all the more reason to practice doing the skill the right way!
  3. Following closely on #2, start slowly and pick of speed as you improve. Remember that you want to learn how to do it right, so you need to move at a pace that allows you to do the skill correctly, not quickly, to start with.
  4. Practice the fundamentals. Keep practicing them. Fundamentals are the foundation for more advanced skills.
  5. “Don’t practice what you know, practice what you don’t know.” The stuff you haven’t yet mastered is the stuff you need to practice. Focusing on the stuff you don’t know can be frustrating simply because you don’t know it, but the only way to ever become good at it is to practice it. The natural inclination is to switch to what you can do since it’s easier and more fun, but that won’t help you progress.
  6. ‘Playing’ is not ‘practicing’. Practice is very focused on learning how to do something very specific (like playing a specific chord, changing between two chords, etc.) and do it properly. Playing is for enjoyment using what you have learned.

I used to mistake ‘playing’ for ‘practicing’, so it was much more difficult to learn a skill. Now I try to break things into smaller parts to focus on, then practice those specific things over and over – and try to get feedback to make sure I’m doing it correctly (preferably from an expert). That allows me to show a marked improvement on those fundamental skills, and lets me fit the separate fundamentals together more easily.

In addition to continually hammering on the fundamentals, it’s also important to take time to ‘play’. While effective practice is critical to learning something properly, you also need to play around and have fun with what you have learned so far. You need a balance between practice and play in order to maintain interest while also improving your abilities.

Another aspect critical to learning a skill is to be willing to have failures and setbacks along the way. Part of learning involves taking small risks, experimenting, and stretching yourself outside your comfort zone. A book I read recently(Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future, by Leonard A. Schlesinger, et. al., Harvard Business Review Press, 2012) with respect to entrepreneurship discusses this at length – how to fail quickly, cheaply, and often. Why? Because you can also learn a lot from your ‘failures’. It is important to note here that ‘failure’ in this sense means that the result of an effort or experiment did not have the intended results. We leverage these failures by analyzing them, learning the proper lessons from them, and applying the resulting experience towards the next ‘experiment’. Using failures to build wisdom that guides us forward closer to our desired futures is a positive, healthy, productive attitude. Conversely, wallowing in despair over each failure is debilitating and destructive. Likewise, failing on purpose by not giving your best effort and then using that as an excuse to quit is unhealthy as well.

As I mentioned above, it was only recently that I’ve truly begun to appreciate how to practice properly and balance practice with play. While I am no means an expert (yet), I have used these techniques to improve my skills in photography, playing guitar, and learning trials biking. In each of these areas, I have watched myself progress – with the biggest leaps in progress following focused repetition of one or more fundamentals. Often you have only seen the end result where I seem to pick up some skill out of nowhere, What you typically have not seen is all the underlying practice. Maybe the once exception has been trials biking. How many times have you seen me attempting the same thing over, and over, and over, and over. How many times have you seen me fall off my bike – whether it be a simple ‘dab’, a controlled bail-out,  a back-flop, or a launch over my handlebars? So when you see me actually successfully pull off a trick, you know it was not my first attempt – by that point I’ve tried it a zillion times, and probably crashed and burned the first half-zillion. You know, because you’ve seen a lot of the unsuccessful attempts and the hours upon hours of practice I put in. I didn’t just hop on a bike and nail a perfect endo first try – I face-planted quite a few times first (hint: that’s why I practice on the grass…it’s softer than pavement).

Hopefully you can benefit from this insight and get much more out of your practicing (of whatever skills you wish to learn). I sure wish I knew how to practice properly when I was a kid.

[Note: I originally wrote this as a life lesson for my son on September 25, 2017.]

Practice

You can become good (or great) at almost anything you desire. All it takes is practice. The better you want to be, the more practice it will take. Experts make difficult things seem easy but they had to practice a lot to become that proficient. If having a given skill is worth it to you, then learn the correct approach and practice, practice, practice! Then you will become the expert.

[Note: I originally wrote this as a life lesson for my son on August 22, 2016.]