The cliché that practice makes perfect has slowly permeated almost every level of the zeitgeist. It’s a bit of a romantic notion to imagine that as long as you work hard at improving you’ll always improve. The principle behind the notion itself isn’t wrong, but it has some serious caveats which tend to be omitted. You may only be able to get better by doing, but you have to make sure what you’re doing actually teaches you something or you’re just treading water.
The notion that “practice makes perfect” is often amended to “only perfect practice makes perfect”. That then begs the question, what is perfect practice? The answer depends on what you know, what you want to know, and what you need to work on. If you’re looking to learn vocabulary, do you practice a word you already know as much as a new word? Probably not, because it doesn’t do much to help. If you’re just starting out, listening to native speakers have a natural conversation is going to be less beneficial than listening to recordings with words you know (for principle practice).
To determine what makes perfect practice, you need to figure out how to apply theory, how to focus your practice, how to get better at the act of practicing, all so that you can get better at doing something by actually doing it right.
Application of Theory
Theory is the scaffolding to build with, and practice is the implementation of the plan. You can’t really implement a plan without planning, and you can’t build a building with plans alone. The application of theory into practice constitutes the act of transforming rote knowledge into understanding. Understanding then leads to internalization of the information.
The application of theory is the synthesis of new thought which serves to test your own limits in understanding. When you learn a new language, you can’t just listen or read, you have to speak or write too. You need to create in that language within its rules and regulations to define the limits of your understanding. Novel linguistic generation hard checks your understanding and internalization of grammar and vocabulary at least.
When you learn a new word, can you say it right? If you learn a new song, can you play it right? For whatever you’re learning, there are going to benchmarks of success at a given stage of learning. You need to focus on what you’re trying to accomplish with your application of theory. When you first start, you want to know how to map the concept to something you understand.
Focusing Your Practice
Different exercises will apply theory differently. If you’re learning to play an instrument, you need to first know how to make a sound, how to make a specific sound, how to put the sounds together, how to follow the rhythm, and how to put emotion into it. As you get more technical, you find more techniques to learn. As you get more technical, you have to also convey more emotion or you become a glorified MIDI song.
There isn’t one way to start learning for most things. Some things come easier than others, some things harder. You can’t ignore the weaknesses, but you shouldn’t ignore the strengths either.
Improve your strengths and shore up your weaknesses. The first step to doing so though is to know what they are. What do you excel at and what do you struggle with? What are you good at from previous experience and what do you take in naturally without help?
These answers also depend on what the point of your practice is. If you’re learning to pass a class, you don’t need to go as in depth as when you’re learning to change your life. Why are you trying to get better?
Once you can answer these questions, you can better focus your practice. If you’re learning a language to speak well, you have to focus on more points than if you just want to go to a market and buy something in the language. Your goals, your knowledge, and your strengths and weaknesses all play into how you should target your practice.
Perfecting Practice
We don’t get to deal with perfection when learning. There is always more to learn or more to research. This is a double edged sword though; it’s easy to declare you know enough about a topic and use the excuse as a crutch to avoid struggling. It’s also easy to say you don’t know enough to procrastinate on moving forward.
Where are you really? You need to come to terms with this or else you’ll lie to yourself. What do you need to shore up and why is it beneficial? It’s also just as easy to lie to yourself that you need to focus on something unimportant because it’s interesting even if it’s useless to your endeavor.
To perfect your practice, you need to train strengths and fix weaknesses for things which affect your goal for learning. I don’t plan to support legacy machines in IT, so I don’t bother to learn the knowledge required to maintain them. While this cuts my maximum understanding down, it also cuts out useless knowledge which doesn’t benefit my goals. Working on legacy machines becomes an exercise rather than practice.
View practice which does not benefit your goals and your needs as exercise (at best) rather than practice. Exercise can keep certain things functional, but it doesn’t necessarily help you grow. A technician who has spent 10 years reloading operating systems isn’t going to be as good as a tech who has spent 2 years training themselves in new technologies. They’ll probably beat you at reloading the operating system, but that is a minor part of the whole field unless you only want to be an imaging tech.
You Only Get Better By Doing
You’ll only get better by doing new things. If you practice the same type of exercises (with the same weight) over and over, you’ll eventually plateau. If you stay in the first chapter of a textbook for a year reading and rereading, will you know as much as a student who read the whole book once over a semester? You have to do more than just repeat the same, vain exercises; you have to confront difficulty to learn more.
You have to build on the scaffolding of your knowledge to learn, and if that scaffold is limited or weak, you can’t safely build as much, or as good of a building. Make your scaffolding better by improving your knowledge. At the same time, a scaffold for a full skyscraper doesn’t do much if you haven’t even touched the first floor.
You need perfect practice to get the right results. There isn’t some objective way to learn outside of to target reinforcing what you know, understanding what you don’t, learning where it can be applied, and understanding what the limits are to a given subject. If you learn the entire history of Powershell, you won’t be a better coder than someone who doesn’t care but writes it daily. You have to practice the right things to fulfill your goals.
What are you trying to learn and why? What don’t you know? How does what you’re learning fulfill your goals? What are your strengths and weaknesses? You need to ask yourself and honestly answer all of these to really perfect your practice. We are all imperfect, so perfection lies in the eye of the beholder.
While this all sounds like common sense, and it is, it is also a form of procrastination. What are you doing when you fall into these traps? I know I’ve been caught more than once and just made myself tread water for ages. Even the brightest, most focused of us are going to fall pray to it at some point if they let down their guard. You have to be aware of what you’re doing and why. Make your practice something you stay mindful and aware of to attain perfect practice.