Practice isn’t fun
It’s a new year, and it’s about time for a hard truth: practice, when done properly, isn’t fun.
I’d love to be able to tell you that it is – that the transcendent joy you get when you practice a skill gives you the best feeling in the world – but that’s not true, and if you pursue that end you’re going to misuse your practice time.
The father of the analysis of practice is Anders Ericsson; his 1993 paper on deliberate practice is a must-read for anyone interested in mastery. In that paper, he distinguishes three different sorts of activity:
- Work is the execution of a skill for an external reward (for instance, a paycheck)
- Play is the execution of a skill for an internal reward (because it makes you happy)
- Deliberate practice is the execution of a skill specifically to improve at that skill
Those distinctions alone leave open the possibility that practice could be fun, but when you start to dig into the depths of activities that are specifically designed to help you improve a particular skill, it turns out that they share very little with the general activities you see in play (or in work, for that matter).
Daniel Coyle provides an example of this in The Talent Code. He describes a video of a schoolgirl practicing the clarinet. She’s an average player, but during one six-minute section of the video, she practices deliberately, and improves markedly as a result. Watching the session, however, you’d be hard-pressed to understand why this particular bit was important, because it certainly doesn’t look like she’s enjoying herself – where later in the session she’s playing through tunes, here she’s constantly stopping and starting. It doesn’t sound like music, or what we naively think of as practice, but it’s the best thing she could be doing.
The point is that the actions that produce the most improvement aren’t closely related to the more common performances of a skill. In a martial art, you may practice a single turn hundreds or thousands of times in order to perfect a tiny piece of a long form. The practice itself isn’t fun, which means we have to trick ourselves into enjoying it by considering the future rewards.
Aside for developers: one consequence of this finding is that side-projects don’t cut it as practice. If you want to improve in your technology and you think you’ll do it in the course of building some application that you have a need for, you’re heading down the wrong path. What eventually happens is that the external reward (of having some tool that you want to use) will inevitably overtake the skill-improvement aspects of the process, and, while you’ll end up with something useful, you won’t have improved as a developer nearly as much as if you’d spent that time practicing more effectively.
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7 Jan 10 at 8:52 am
I respectfully disagree. Yes, repetition as a part of practice isn’t the most fun one could have. However, there are plenty of situations, in my music and in my programming, where I thoroughly enjoy what I’m doing. When it comes down to it, I feel happy to be doing what it is that I love doing. There are always times, even in practice, in which the work being done is extremely satisfying, as it coalesces into the final goal. I’ve felt that pleasure many times.
Tony
7 Jan 10 at 9:16 am
If you dont enjoy or at least appreciate the sights along the path you are following, you are following the wrong path…
Casimir
8 Jan 10 at 4:57 am
@Tony and @Casimir: I think I may have underplayed the most important bit of this post: deliberate practice, the most effective form of practice, *isn’t* what we normally think of as practice. The sorts of practice we enjoy are perfectly fine, but they’re nowhere near as effective as the sorts of practice I’m talking about.
Think of it in basketball terms: scrimmaging is more on the fun-practice side, while shooting 1000 free throws, pausing at each step in the process, is on the deliberate practice side. You may certainly enjoy the *result* of those free throws, but the actual shooting of them? Not so much.
Ben
8 Jan 10 at 6:42 am
One thing that the author of _The Talent Code_ is careful to point out is, activities that require great and precise mechanical precision (musicianship, athleticism involving form [figure skating, for example], etc) require a differently-created set of neural circuits than those that tend to be more free-form (team-based sports [soccer, for example], writing, cooking, etc).
I’d argue that software development is in the latter camp. It’s a mix of engineering (figuring out what tools to use to solve a problem), writing (expressing the use of those tools in a pithy language), and editing (fixing bugs, refactoring to make things clearer, etc). It’s a skill that benefits from having a large body of knowledge and experience to draw upon.
To use the example of the Bronté sisters and writing from _The Talent Code_, they got as good as they did from writing _a lot_ of throwaway stories before any of their published works. I think that’s akin to how side-projects work: you build something new and novel, hopefully pushing your own boundaries as a developer, make mistakes and learn from them.
You most certainly don’t get better as a developer from rewriting the same basic code over and over and over again, as the free-throw example would indicate. There’s no mechanical skill involved at all; there’s no muscle memory.
mattly
8 Jan 10 at 3:59 pm
@mattly: That’s a great point. Interestingly, however, basketball still provides a counterpoint – it is 1) composed of individual skills that can be mechanically, repetitively practiced (free throws), and 2) a team sport demanding more flexible behaviors. Cooking is the same – there are component skills (knife work) that are used in the larger context of performance.
I think the overall argument, however, is more theoretical than anything else: the *most effective* way to improve a skill is to practice it in a particular fashion, and that fashion requires the driving force of the practice to be improvement. Any alternative goal – fun, money, or whatever – will result in suboptimal results.
Ben
9 Jan 10 at 5:03 pm
Just in case you missed this: an NYT review of David Shenk’s new book, “The Genius in All of Us”. Good bit of research background and practical advice on deliberate practice.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/books/review/Paul-t.html?src=me&ref=books
Fred Medlin
20 Mar 10 at 9:48 pm