“For 37 years I’ve practiced 14 hours a day, and now
they call me a genius.” – Pablo de Sarasate, virtuoso violinist
“The harder I work, the more talented I get.” – Linda Langeheine,
author
Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a
person reaches a level of “acceptable” performance and automaticity, the
additional years of “practice” don’t lead to improvement. Automated abilities
gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate and strategic efforts to
improve. You have to push yourself to get better.
The passion to master is an almost obsessive desire to
improve. Artists, corporate
athletes, Olympic champions all have it. It all has to do with motivation to get better, maybe even
become the best.
There is a fundamental truth about any sort of
practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never
improve. Playing the same set of songs in exactly the same way over and over
again may accumulate many “practice” hours, but will never lead to mastery and
unconscious excellence. That’s a recipe for stagnation, not improvement.
Getting out of your comfort zone means trying to do
something that you couldn’t do before. It means constantly trying things that
are just beyond current abilities. It demands near-maximal effort, which is
generally not enjoyable. Finding ways around barriers is one of the keys to
purposeful practice. It is
surprisingly rare to get clear evidence in any field that a person has reached
some immutable limit on performance.
People more often just give up and stop trying to
improve.
The reason that most people don’t possess
extraordinary capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them,
but rather because they are satisfied to live in the comfortable groove of
homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live
in the world of “adequate”. We learn enough to get by in our day-to-day
lives, but once we reach that point, we seldom push to go beyond good enough.
We do very little that challenges our brains to develop new gray matter or to
rewire entire sections.
Doing the same thing over and over again in exactly
the same way is not a recipe for improvement; it is a recipe for stagnation and
gradual decline. Unless you are using practice techniques specifically designed
to improve those particular skills, trying harder will not get you very far.
But it’s important to remember that the option exists.
If you wish to become significantly better at something, you can.
The goal is not just to reach your potential but to
build it, to make things possible that were not possible before. This requires
challenging homeostasis – getting out of your comfort zone - and forcing your brain and your body to
adapt.
Revolutionary scientific
discoveries involve a neural insulator called myelin, which some neurologists
now consider to be the holy grail of acquiring skill. Every human skill,
whether it's typing with 10 fingers, playing baseball, nailing difficult job
interviews or playing Chopin, is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a
tiny electrical impulse—basically, a signal traveling through a circuit.
Myelin's vital role is to wrap those nerve fibers the same way that rubber
insulation wraps a copper wire, making the signal stronger and faster by preventing
the electrical impulses from leaking out. When we fire our circuits in the
right way—when we practice swinging that golf club or rehearsing that
presentation—our myelin responds by wrapping layers of insulation around that
neural circuit, each new layer adding a bit more skill and speed. The thicker
the myelin gets, the better it insulates, and the faster and more accurate our
movements and thoughts become. Skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural
circuits and that grows in response to certain signals.
The more time and energy you
put into the right kind of practice—the longer you stay in the concentrated focus
zone, firing the right signals through your circuits—the more skill you get,
or, to put it a slightly different way, the more myelin you earn.
What matters is that learners divide up what can look
like an infinite amount of material to train into a series of clear steps,
making the progress more achievable, concrete and encouraging. It is necessary
to break up the quest into a series of stages, each devoted to a particular
technique, and at each step to develop ways to monitor progress. This kind of practice is a highly
targeted, error-focused process. Never skip over mistakes – stop and work on
the weak aspects. Experiences
where you're forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them end up making
you competent and elegant without your realizing it. Make errors, stop, struggle, and learn from your mistakes.
Why is
targeted, mistake-focused practice so effective? Because the best way to build
a good circuit is to fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again, over and
over. Struggle is not an option: it's a biological requirement.
You also need feedback. Perhaps a colleague, teacher, mentor or video can make
hidden mistakes visible.
Spending
time watching or listening to the desired skill—the song, the move, the swing—as
a single coherent entity. We have so many possibilities to learn from others
and observe their performances. TED talks, YouTube videos, CDs, concerts,
lectures, seminars, self-help books can all contribute to improvement.
But, in the
end, YOU have to do the work. There is, biologically speaking, no substitute
for attentive repetition. Nothing you can do—talking, thinking, reading,
imagining—is more effective in building skill than executing the action, firing
the impulse down the nerve fiber, being or becoming aware of mistakes, fixing
errors, honing the circuit.
Don't look
for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time.
That's the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.
