Practice Makes Perfect?

I am sure that everyone has heard the phrase ‘Practice makes perfect’ at some point in their life. Parents tell this to their children, and school teachers tell this to their students. But what is ‘practice’? Why do some students learn faster than others, while putting in the same amount of hours? How does Ryan Gosling learn the piano in 9 months for the movie La La Land, whereas others spend 2 years trying to pass Grade 1? How does Tony Robbins become a black belt in Taekwondo in 6 months when it takes other people 6 years? The idea that most people seem to adopt is that these people are just born smarter. They are blessed with a lot of ‘natural talent’. But is this really the case, or is there something else going on?

“I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect. Only in zeal and hard work.” – Charles Darwin

The first idea I ever read about practice was the idea of deliberate practice. In her book ‘Grit’, Angela Duckworth describes this as follows: “Deliberate practice entails engaging in a focused, typically planned training activity designed to improve some aspect of performance.” My take on this is that your practice should have a clear purpose. Are you going into BJJ class and rolling with your friend where you both try to kill each other, or maybe rolling with the newest white belt to smash them and make yourself feel good? Or are you going in to focus on one specific element of your game. Maybe you will spend 30 minutes drilling one particular technique, then spend 30 minutes rolling but only focusing on trying to hit that one specific technique.

Another example would be if you decide to start running. Are you going out for a mindless 1 mile jaunt every day? Or are you going for a focused run, pushing yourself to do your 1 mile 5 seconds faster every day? Maybe you will start with 1 mile and do a quarter mile more each day.

Another thing to consider is that you cannot ‘practice jiu jitsu’ or ‘practice maths’ or ‘practice piano’. What specifically are you going to practice? Even each specific jiu jitsu technique might contain 15 different tiny details. Each piano piece contains hundreds of different transitions between notes. You must break it down. Lets say you ‘practice’ a piano piece by playing through it 5 times. Each tiny transition has only been played 5 times, and when playing through a piece start to finish, how much focus can you really put on each tiny part? It’s not going to be a very efficient route to improvement to practice this way.

Lets say instead you start to play through your piano piece and stop at the first mistake or imperfection you notice. You zone in on this and find exactly where you are going wrong. Now you break down this transition and play through it with focus and mindfulness, deliberately trying to correct the mistake or imperfection. Within a few minutes you can probably get 100 repetitions of this one small part of the piece. On top of that, you can apply much more focus to each repetition, as you know exactly what you are trying to change. In my opinion, this is the essence of deep practice.

In his book ‘The Talent Code’, Daniel Coyle gives some guidelines for what he terms deep practice. Deep practice involves operating at the very edge of your ability, and therefore it is not going to look impressive. It won’t sound good and it won’t feel comfortable. It is the act of continuous refinement, focusing not on what you are doing well, but on what you are doing wrong. Coyle suggests getting a feel for the ‘sweet spot’ of deep practice. You should break what you are doing down into parts, going as slowly as is required to do it correctly. You should then do focused and perfect repetitions. Note that deep practice does not push your physical limits, but your mental limits. Try to do this for 15 minutes, and you will feel yourself using up all the focus and concentration that you have available.

After a while, each repetition will begin to require less refinement, and will look and feel less awkward and uncomfortable. As you start to iron out all of the inefficiencies, the practice starts to become a little different. You have reached the stage of conscious competence, but have not yet reached the stage of unconscious competence. At this point, progress will become slower. However, that doesn’t mean this practice is less important. An amateur practices until they can get it right, but a professional practices until they can’t get it wrong.

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once. I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” – Bruce Lee
learning curve

As your reps become more effortless, a new stage of practice emerges. You are no longer in that zone of deep practice. Maybe this type of practice would be described as more of a flow state. This occurs when you are not trying to refine a piece of music, or refine a jiu jitsu technique, but are merely trying to perform perfect repetitions. This is maybe where practice becomes more like an art form. For example, watching Floyd Mayweather hit pads, or Steph Curry dribbling two basketballs at once. Although the skill has become so natural, this level of skill at an activity does not start out natural. More like the complete opposite. It is the result of incredible amounts of deliberate practice, deep practice, focus and hard work.
What I think stops most people, including myself, from always putting in true practice, is that it is a lot more difficult. It is not fun, and it takes a lot more sacrifice and discipline. No one wants to sit at the side drilling side control escapes when everyone else is rolling, or sit on the sideline doing passing drills while your friends play 5 a side football. How much of your time you decide to spend putting in deliberate and deep practice is up to you, and depends on what your goals are. However, perhaps it is only through this disciplined and difficult work that you can truely hit the highest level of enjoyment of an activity. I would imagine that no one enjoys game day as much as Lebron James, or no one enjoys fight day as much as Conor McGregor.

“There is no glory in practice. But without practice, there is no glory.” – Anonymous

I also think it is important to be honest with yourself and recognise when you are actually putting in real practice, and when you are just doing what’s fun, or what’s easy. Try to avoid the practice that is neither fun nor productive. Doing your homework while you watch TV does not make it less boring. Mindlessly drilling a BJJ technique while daydreaming does not make it less boring. What actually makes these things the most boring, is that you are not becoming immersed in what you are doing.

I would like to stress that I’m not suggesting that you should never roll competitively in jiu jitsu, or that you shouldn’t play a piano piece through until you are a master of it, etc. However, I just think that this is not exactly a good way to practice. This is more like a testing ground, a way to expose your flaws. The actual act of competing against someone doesn’t make you that much better, however in exposing your weaknesses, it lets you know what you need to work on, which in turn will make you better.

So in conclusion, practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. Natural talent may or may not exist, but whether or not it does is pretty much irrelevant. You can’t control how much ‘natural talent’ you do or don’t have. You can only control what you do today to get better. So go put in some purposeful practice.