Archive for the ‘practice’ tag
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.
The virtue of practice
Practice makes perfect – anonymous
When I was back in school, I did a lot of different things. I played a musical instrument, I programmed computers, I played volleyball, I studied foreign languages – and the key to getting better at each of them, I was told, was practice.
So, I practiced. With some skills, I got better. With others, I didn’t. And because I was young and foolish (as opposed to being older and foolish, which I am now), I thought that there was something about each domain that made it more or less amenable to improvement via practice. Some things, I thought, only get better through performance, not through practice. In those performances, I tended to mess up, but I got better after each one.
What I didn’t realize at the time is that I was just practicing incorrectly – and that was turning my performances into public practice sessions.
People who write about spring training not being necessary have never tried to throw a baseball – Sandy Koufax
If you look for it, you can find a huge amount of literature on practice. It seems cyclical; every few years, another cluster of books hit the shelves and articles hit the newspapers (or, more recently, the blogs). The interesting thing, though, is that there’s no central practice section of the library – people write about it in every sphere. One of my favorite books on the subject is George Leonard’s Mastery, which uses the martial arts as a lens onto the role of practice in the journey to mastery. Chad Fowler’s The Passionate Programmer is more recent, and is also very good – discussing (among other topics) the role of practice in software development.
There are a few books that investigate the role of practice more generally. One of my favorites of these is Talent Is Overrated, by Geoff Colvin, which has the benefit of bringing in stories of the power of practice across many domains (be sure to read the section about Ben Franklin and his wonderful, obsessive practicing of the art of writing).
The common thread among the best of the books that deal with practice is the concept of deliberate practice. This, it turns out, was what I’d failed to appreciate in school.
Practice is the best of all instructors – Pubilius Syrus
Deliberate practice is as different from indifferent practice as cross-country running is from walking. The key is twofold: choice of practice materials, and attention. If you’re exclusively practicing things you already know how to do, you’re not practicing deliberately. If you’re not paying attention and actively striving to learn from your practice sessions, you’re again not practicing deliberately. The goal is to stretch during practice – attempt to do something new, and pay close attention to your performance so that you can see where you fall short. You should come out of a practice session tired, because intense focus is exhausting. You shouldn’t succeed at everything you attempt during practice, because that means you haven’t been practicing the right things – or your standards are too low.
Practicing the right way is hard – which only makes sense; if it were easy, everyone would do it, and we’d see a lot more excellence in every field. Nevertheless, for many of us, it’s worth it. Excellence (or mastery) in a field is one of the finest goals we can aim for, and practice is really the only way to achieve it.