Practice doesn’t make perfect: It builds a toolkit.
This picture brings me back to when I was seven years old, clinging onto the sweaty metal bar in ballet class. “OK, stop, girls,” Mrs. Kotelly, my ballet teacher, said. “We’re doing to do the pliés again; you didn’t do them well enough during this past exercise. I’m stopping the music, and I’ll count out the beats for ten pliés using the developé arms we talked about earlier.” The melodious Chopin came to a screeching halt.
Mrs. Kotelly begins to count slowly. “These are going to be some awfully long pliés,” I think to myself. We had already been doing plié exercises for 15 minutes.
“Girls, keep your bottoms down. Pull you stomachs in. Keep your back straight and knees out.” I gripped the bar to balance myself. For those of you who aren’t well acquainted with ballet, pliés are not necessarily physically difficult compared to other steps one can learn in ballet. They are the most basic exercise one can do, and since they are crucial to everything else in ballet, they naturally must be perfected from an early age — which explains why Mrs. Kotelly was making us do so many pliés.
As Mrs. Kotelly stood there at the front of the classroom, her grey hair perfectly tied back, with cheeks always the same rosy shade, I remembered what she had told our class many times prior: “Even though pliés don’t look difficult, you should be sweating by the end of the exercise. That’s how hard you should work on these.” I focused on adjusting my body with each and every plié, her words always stuck with me.
“…and 10,” Mrs. Kotelly concluded the exercise. “Good job, ladies; practice makes perfect. Always remember that.”
Little did I know that Mrs. Kotelly would still be making me do the same plié exercise 11 years later in the same exact classroom. In 14 years of ballet, I probably did 200,000 pliés. Needless to say, I don’t think they ever hit the point of perfection. This notion of “practice makes perfect” is unrealistic because perfection will never be truly achieved.
So what can practice help us do if practice doesn’t actually make perfect? Well, practice can help us build a toolkit of skills, which is essential for creativity development. The number one thing that you need to do to be creative in any given field or domain is develop a toolkit of skills that pertain to that domain.
For example, if you are passionate about coffee, and you want to be creative in the field of making coffee, you need to fully understand coffee — where it comes from, how it is cultivated, how the beans are roasted, how it is brewed, how it tastes, how it smells, and what emotions it provokes. You need to know everything, and once you’ve acquired a deep understanding of coffee and its processes as a whole, you can be truly creative.
Now, you may be thinking, “OK, I don’t think I really need to understand every little thing about coffee to be an innovator in the world of coffee.” Well, imagine the converse. Say the only thing you knew about coffee was that it was a plant. What exactly would you do with that knowledge? Probably not much — you probably wouldn’t become the Zuckerberg of the coffee world.
“Creativity is something we can all improve at… It is about daring to learn from our mistakes.” — James Dyson (Inventor).
The point is, you need a toolkit of knowledge about the things that interest you, and from there on out you can begin to become truly creative in that passion. You can’t be creative in something that you have very limited knowledge about or that you don’t actually care about. Creativity is entirely limited to what you know, so you first need to develop knowledge and expertise. Thus, having the capacity to be truly creative in a domain takes a lot of “practice” so to say, before achieving some sense of mastery.
