If you have ever picked up an instrument, paint brush, baseball bat, or programming IDE you have almost certainly faced a barrage of frustration. Everybody else makes it look so easy. How did they get so good? The old saying goes, “Practice makes perfect.” But there are particular nuances to developing skills that makes that saying almost useless. Misguided practice can do more harm than good. Practice is how you teach your mind and body to go through actions effortlessly. If you practice incorrectly, you are teaching your mind and body to fall into incorrect patterns of thought and action. Practicing past the point of exhaustion is equally as bad. When you are exhausted you get sloppy. Therefore, practicing while exhausted reinforces sloppy performance. So the saying should probably go, “Perfect practice makes perfect.”
A Three Step Approach
How do you achieve perfect practice when you are not perfect, when you are starting from square one? The first step is learning how your brain and body work to learn. Once you are aware of this process, you will be able to better identify good practice from bad practice. Some great resources include: The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, and Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland.
Second, you will need to seek out a mentor and solid learning materials for the skill you wish to develop. Good mentors and learning materials will help you break the larger skill down into smaller, more easily mastered skills. Learning materials can include books, online media, lectures and classes. But the most important part is finding a mentor. Mentors can observe and give feedback, point you to great learning materials, and share proven exercises and warmup routines. Having a mentor means you have someone to point out and correct flaws in your practice early. If you plan on making a career out of your new skill, having a close mentor means you have at least one reference who can vouch for your abilities and notify you of opportunities.
Third, you need to practice with awareness and intent. Know what you are trying to accomplish during a given practice session, focus on that, notice flaws in execution, slow down (in most cases), make corrections and repeat and repeat and repeat. This process is discussed at length in The Talent Code and is referred to as “deep practice.” Once you understand and can achieve deep practice, make a habit out of it. Repetition is central to the idea of mastery through deep practice, and habituation is the surest way to ensure the required long-lived repetition. Remember that learning and mastery are something that happens inside you, physically. Mentors are great tools, but they can’t make you learn. You have to act.
The Biology
When you practice something you are promoting two types of neural activity central to skill mastery: the myelination of neurons and the integration of behavior into your basal ganglia.
Myelin is a substance that wraps around the axons of neurons to aid in the transmission of signals along those myelinated axons. More myelin is deposited on neurons that fire together. Therefore, when you practice deeply, making sure to build technique intentionally, your are training you neurons to fire quickly and reliably in the exact patterns that result in the desired action. Do this enough and it becomes easier to perform correctly than it is to make a mistake. Training your nervous system in this way is what is often referred to as “muscle memory.” You may also be familiar with the phrase, “Neurons that fire together wire together.” This is a catchy way to remember the myelination process. By repeating an action with precision, you strengthen the network of neurons responsible for that precise action.
The basal ganglia is the portion of our brain responsible for effortless action, instinct, and much involuntary action. It is the core of our primal brain and is common in all vertebrates. It is commonly referred to as the “lizard brain.” It uses dopamine as its main neurotransmitter and is very receptive to training. It is, in essence, a stimulus (or cue) and response machine. Skinner boxes and other examples of classic conditioning rely heavily on the basal ganglia. In humans, studies of individuals with cerebral damage have shown that strong pathways in the basal ganglia can drive behavior without the intervention of higher brain function. One of my favorite examples is that of a man who could find his way to the bathroom in his house if he needed to go, but could not tell researchers how to get to the bathroom when asked.
Under normal circumstances, our basal ganglia handle a lot of tasks that we would be bogged down by if we had to consciously think about them, such as walking, driving, brushing our teeth, and showering; menial things we do every day with little thought or effort. Part of the task of mastery then is to offload tasks onto the basal ganglia to make them effortless while freeing up some bandwidth of the higher brain activities. Because the basal ganglia handles cue-response type actions, training largely depends on establishing and repeating such actions, as well as a reward/punishment schedule.
The cue is largely contextual. The measure of music you just played serves as a cue for the one that comes next. The position of players on the field serves as a cue for where you should throw the ball. The figure you just sketched might serve as a cue to check the action lines and tilt. It is your job to figure out what cues to look for in your work and how to respond to them. Do it enough and it will become automatic.
Rewards and punishments are also important. They tell your basal ganglia which responses are favorable and which are undesirable. It can be simple. A negative feeling is a suitable punishment. All you have to do is tell yourself, “No!” and start over. Likewise, positive feelings are suitable for rewards. Take pride in well-executed actions. Use these subtly though and don’t make them your focus. It can become too easy to beat yourself up and start believing that you will never be any good. This thought process will ultimately end your pursuit of mastery if left unchecked. Likewise, too much pride can lead to complacency and inaction. Don’t get so full of yourself that you stop practicing. Focus on the actions, not the product. Remember that you are trying to build your nervous system when practicing, not make a finished product.
A Note on History
Practice and habituation to the end of mastery have been understood for millennia. The ethics of Aristotle and the tenets of Confucianism are rooted in an understanding of the relationship between practice and effortless action (i.e. mastery).
In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics virtue is defined as the habit of choosing the mean (as in average) between two extremes. The idea is that virtuous action lay between two extreme vices (e.g. courage is the mean between cowardice and recklessness). But to be virtuous Aristotle argued that one must make a habit of choosing the virtuous action. Further, Aristotle recognizes that the purpose of everything we do in life is eudaimonea (translated as: happiness, flourishing, or living well). He defines a “good human” as one that fulfills the defining function of humans. The defining function he identifies looks a lot like the process outlined above, guiding growth to mastery using our uniquely human powers of reason.
Confucianism used the imagery of preparing a gem stone, calling for individuals to be “cut, ground, and polished” into proper upstanding citizens. While the systematization and ritualization of everything is one aspect of Confucianism that came under attack by Daoism, such tenets proved effective at habituating practitioners so that they behaved “correctly” with little effort.