Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect
Why you can’t just practice a task over and over to get better at it.
I’ve played piano growing up. Over the 10+ years when I was progressing through the grade system (Royal Conservatory of Music) and still learning, I’ve always had a difficult time perfecting my pieces to be able to play them flawlessly. I would practice 2 or sometimes 3 hours a day, every day, but still I would never be able to nail the pieces I was learning. Until one day, my piano teacher said this one thing to me: Practice doesn’t make perfect. It makes permanent.
The idea is simple — if you do something over and over again, it becomes ingrained in your memory, whether it’s muscle memory (as in piano) or otherwise. The routine of doing something a certain way solidifies with each repetition of the task, and eventually becomes the natural way that you progress about that task. But what if the way you practice is wrong? What happens if you are under the impression that you’re doing something correctly but is fundamentally flawed? As you practice that incorrect version of your task, you’re solidifying that wrong method, leading to it’s permanency.
Perfect practice makes permanent perfection. Practicing a task doesn’t make you any better at it unless what you’re practicing is the correct way to do it. First break down your task into its components and make sure those are right. Take it slowly and ensure that you’re meeting the standard that you’re reaching for. Ask a peer who is knowledge in the area to correct you and from there, build up. Practice it perfectly once. Then twice. And with that, you’ll be able to practice towards perfection.
-L
