Ben Scofield

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.

My five-year anniversary with Viget Labs is approaching quickly – I started here back in February 2005. Before I reach that milestone, though, there’s another that’s been at least as influential in my life: this month is my five year anniversary of using Ruby and Rails. I started experimenting with ‘em during my last month at Nextel, when I was using classic ASP and C# in the office and looking for PHP jobs (which, to bring it back around, led me to Viget).

I really only played with Rails for a few months, but by mid-2005 I’d gotten deep enough into it that I started talking about it at the office. Even more importantly, I was able to bring concepts from Rails into my PHP projects, which made for visibly better code. By 2006, people got tired enough of me pointing out how easy it would be to build the next project in Rails, so we tried it out on a client, and the rest fell into place very quickly.

Aside from that, though, Ruby’s been very good to me, personally. It’s allowed me to speak internationally, write a book, organize an event series, co-chair a global conference, and (last, but far from least) meet and befriend some amazing, brilliant people. I can honestly say that starting with Ruby and Rails five years ago was one of the best decisions I made in the last decade – and while I don’t expect to work in Ruby forever, I hope that every technology I use in the future has a community as devoted to excellence and civility as this one.

In light of the impending new year, I thought I’d offer an alternative to the associated flood of well-intentioned but ultimately-doomed resolutions: weekly goals. (And yes, I contributed to the flood myself. Color me somewhat hypocritical.)

I see several problems with annual resolutions, all related to their length. When you’re making year-long goals, it’s extremely difficult to figure out exactly what is possible, so you’re less likely to set appropriately difficult (but still achievable) targets. Even when you succeed in that, however, the size of the goals can be intimidating, so it’s harder to get started. Weekly goals deal with both of these issues – it’s much easier to figure out how much you can do, and it’s simpler to see how to tackle a smaller goal. In addition, the feedback cycle is so much shorter that you can easily adjust your goal-setting from week to week, which means that it’s possible to improve at goal setting in a reasonable timeframe.

What does this mean? Well, take one of the most popular resolutions: losing weight. The first obstacle is moving from a vague “lose weight” to something more concrete, but what’s the appropriate target? It’s all too easy to shoot too high when your primary knowledge about weight loss comes from The Biggest Loser. Even if you figure out a reachable target, having your goal be “lose fifty pounds this year,” can be intimidating all on its own. Larger goals are harder to get your mind around; at times, it can be hard to figure out how best to get going.

Contrast that with the weekly version. If you’re aiming to lose a pound a week, that means you need to burn 3500 calories more than you take in for the week. With a solid target, it’s much easier to plan out how to do it – pass up dessert here and there, eat less calories in snacks, park farther away from the door, and before you know it you’re meeting your goal. At a weekly level, you can also experiment – see just how much better or worse you do by replacing a steak with a salad, etc.

Of course, this points to a useful strategy: you can still make your ill-defined annual resolutions, but back them up with weekly goals to help you make the longer-term goals work. Good luck, and happy new year!

Seth’s post yesterday struck a chord with me, as it reminded me of how I felt a few months ago. At the time, I was posting extremely regularly here in the blog, and it seemed like ideas were flowing easily – my idea notebooks in Evernote were overflowing. This continued into November, even when I turned away from the blog in favor of working on a book proposal. I was still writing things down, however, and that kept the ideas flowing.

Towards the end of November, however, I took a break from writing (RubyConf, travel, and a few other things intervened). At first, the idea flood continued – I essentially ignored them, and for a time they continued to build, until I felt an almost-physical pressure. Finally, I gave in and recorded a dozen or so into trusty Evernote, but by then the damage was done, and what had been a constant stream of ideas (both good and bad) ended up more akin to a floodplain than a flood.

It’s taken some effort, but I’m finally getting back into things, and I’m wiser for the experience now. Ideas seem to be one of those “rich getting richer” phenomena, where the people who respect and encourage the flow of all ideas are the ones who end up having more of them. So, if you haven’t tried, start carrying a notebook or a voice recorder around, and record all those things that pop into your head. Who knows which one of them might be amazing, and end up changing your life?

I’m generally a pretty calm guy. We’ve all got pet peeves, though, and one of my occurs all too frequently. I’m talking about people who think their decisions and mistakes while driving are irreversible. You know, people who cut across three lanes of traffic to make a left turn into a mall parking lot, when they could easily make a u-turn at the next light – that sort of thing. In the grand scheme of things it’s clearly trivial, but it never fails to tick me off.

I discovered the Myers-Briggs personality inventory nearly fifteen years ago (I’m an INTP, thanks for asking), and one of the dimensions it evaluates is very much related to the idea that decisions are irreversible. People range from perceiving to judging (I know, they’re pretty awful names for the trait, but go with it) – where perceivers typically put off making a decision, and judgers tend to prefer having things settled.

I mentioned I’m an INTP, where the P stands for perceiver. Given the above brief description, then, you might expect me to be on the side of the irreversible-deciders, but in fact reversibility makes being a perceiver much easier. What better way to decide what to do could there be than actually making a provisional decision and seeing what happens? This has parallels in all sorts of fields: minimum viable products, agile development, tasting while cooking – they’re all predicated on committing to a course of action as little as possible, and being able to adjust (or even reverse) that commitment as necessary.

I think we’d all be a lot happier if we realized that relatively little in life is irreversible – and who knows what you may discover by trying something out without the fear of having committed to the wrong course forever.