Practice Makes Imperfect
Well, here’s a nice little introduction. This is another one of my longer posts, which hopefully shouldn’t take as much time to finish as my previous ones. The good thing about these introductions is that I can put anything that I want up here, and besides giving some context that I might be an actual person, they really don’t have much to do with the topic of the blog. Here’s a hint on how to tell if I’m writing a longer post or not: If I start out saying something that has nothing to do with the topic, go ahead and get comfortable, because I have a lot to say.
Alright, enough of the introduction. On with the post:
Practice = Perfect
We have all heard the phrase “practice makes perfect.” If you haven’t heard it by now, well, you just read it, so you have been told. That’s a pretty insightful little saying, actually. In order to attain excellence, we simply have to practice a whole bunch, right? It certainly makes sense. If I practice doing push-ups, my arms will get stronger, so it will be easier for me. If I practice changing my beliefs, I’ll find it much easier to adopt new beliefs. If I practice jumping off of cliffs, well… okay, so that’s a bad example… I can’t exactly get much better at falling, since I’m not the one doing the work. Throwing a ball can be improved with practice, though.
So, if practice makes perfect, and it is such a common phrase, what am I doing writing this article? Stop… don’t peak back at the title… I know you saw it once, but I’m hoping that you only glanced at it casually. Still with me, and still unaware of the true wording for the title of this post? Darn… I was hoping to slide that past. Oh well, here’s what I was going to say anyways: I’m writing this because practice makes things too perfect.
Practice != Perfect (That’s computer geek short hand for Practice does not equal Perfect)
Alright, let’s say that I’ve been practicing push-ups. I get so good that I can do nearly eighty push-ups in under two minutes, and I’m in such good shape that I decide to join the military so that I can show off. (Yes, I realize the complete lack of logic there, but I have to build my analogy somehow. 
) I join the Army, get to Basic Training, and my drill sergeant tells the whole platoon to do thirty five push-ups. Great, I can do thirty five of them without taking a break. I get down and start out really quickly, and all of the sudden, I’m being yelled at directly. What went wrong? I’m doing the push-ups, and I can do twice as many as I’m being asked for, so why am I being yelled at? There’s a skinny guy next to me who can barely do ten, so why isn’t he being yelled at? (Actually, in truth, I was the skinny guy… but remember, I’m making an analogy, so bear with me, okay?)
Well, as it turns out, the drill sergeant was more concerned with *how* we were doing the push-ups, not *how many* we could do. The big guy who could crank out eighty push-ups wasn’t using all of his strength, because he was only going down five inches. The skinny guy, who was banging his forehead against the pavement, was fine because he was practicing the right way, even if he couldn’t do as many as he was commanded to do. The skinny guy had a lot easier time through all of it, because he had not yet made a habit out of doing push-ups, so when his muscles caught up to the strain, he didn’t have to do any extra work. The big guy, however, had to re-train his muscles to let him do deeper push-ups, which besides doubling the amount of work he had to do compared to before, was also extremely unmotivating, since he found out that much of his work previously had been wasted.
So, practice is a bad thing, then? Practice just leads to more work, but in the long run, it doesn’t matter? Um, well, if you’re looking for a reason to procrastinate and become less effective, go ahead and believe that. One of my main points, however, is the title of this next section, aptly titled:
Practice Makes Habit.
I’ve heard this concept described a couple of different ways before… The first time I heard it, the phrasing was “perfect practice makes perfect,” and when worded that way, it seemed a little unmotivating. Who here among us are perfect? Hands up, all one of you. You’re not perfect? Well, to be perfect, all you have to do is practice perfectly. Does that seem like an easy task? If you keep telling someone that only perfect practice makes perfect, do you think that they’ll be more likely to practice? Well, that was my problem for a long time. I’d avoid consciously practicing things so that I wouldn’t mess them up. What I ended up doing was practicing procrastination and avoidance, and let me tell you, I got very good at that.
Well, quite recently, I heard the same concept phrased a different way. The person who told me this new way of looking at it isn’t exactly the most conscious person around, but he was relating a story of how he told his son that practice makes perfect, and his son turned around and said “No, dad. Practice makes habit.” We all should know the power of habit by now. For those who like seeing this poem, here it is again:
I am your constant companion.
I am your greatest helper or heaviest burden.
I will push you onward or drag you down to failure.
I am completely at your command.Half of the things you do you might as well turn over to me
and I will do them - quickly and correctly.
I am easily managed - you must be firm with me.
Show me exactly how you want something done and
after a few lessons, I will do it automatically.I am the servant of great people,
and alas, of all failures as well.
Those who are great, I have made great.
Those who are failures, I have made failures.I am not a machine though
I work with the precision of a machine
plus the intelligence of a person.You may run me for profit or run me for ruin -
it makes no difference to me.
Take me, train me, be firm with me, and
I will place the world at your feet.
Be easy with me and I will destroy you.Who am I? I am Habit.
Are you seeing the values of practice now? If I throw a baseball, it doesn’t make me better at throwing them, it gives me a habit, and the habit is a style for throwing baseballs. Certainly, if I have never thrown a baseball before, and I practiced for a month, I would see an incredible improvement, because before I have the habit, I’m still learning, and I’m able to change my style until I find one that works good enough. When I practice something that is good enough, that level of mediocrity will be my habit, and I would have to change how I practice before I can achieve something different from mediocrity. This brings me to my next section:
Ready, Fire, Aim.
Yes, that is out of order. If you didn’t notice that it was out of order, look at the section heading again, then come back here. If you still think it is the right order, well good on you, at least you have an understanding of what I’m about to say.
The Ready, Fire, Aim approach takes into account the fact that the first habits we choose aren’t always going to be the best ones. Here’s how it works. Identify a goal and do some research on it, just enough so that you have a good idea of what it will take to implement it. Most people would take the next step and plan out that implementation in detail, but until we have had some much needed experience, we don’t know what factors will affect us. Should we go ahead and plan for every contingency, and make certain that nothing ever goes wrong? At the point where we start planning, how can we know that something might go wrong if we haven’t had any experience yet?
If all we do is plan for every eventuality, we will never start. If we can narrow our concentration down to the problems that are specific to our situation, then we have a much more manageable number of problems, and we can easily find solutions to them as they pop up. This approach is essential to the success of making good habits. If we do nothing but plan, the only thing that we are practicing is planning. Nothing really gets done when we take too much time to plan. If we just start, but don’t refine our methods, then we never improve, and we are stuck in the same spot that we were in when we first started.
The Ready, Fire, Aim approach is really a compromise between doing and planning. We need to get some experience in order to know what to plan for, and we need to have a plan so that we can succeed. If we stop looking at mistakes as failure, then we can try a method with just enough preparation to get us off the ground, then when we have done our first test, we can take a step back, look at what we can sustain and improve, then try another test.
Practice, Plan, Practice, Plan
Some of the hardest work in personal development is forming your habits. The reason is, most people look at the forming of habits as hard work, something that takes self discipline, and something that takes a lot of time. Well, that certainly is one way to make habits, but it clearly isn’t the most effective way. I’ve found that practicing is just as effective at forming habits as actually going out and accomplishing tasks, but it is a lot easier.
Why, though, is it so much easier to turn practice into habit than to turn determined action into habit? Well, it is all psychological. Most of us grew up in families where the parents told us to do something, but very few of us were told to practice something. The few times that we were told to practice, we weren’t under any pressure, and could mess up as often as we could. It was all firmly under our control how well and how long we practiced, but we had strict guidelines about the quality and timeliness of assigned tasks. If we didn’t accomplish our tasks, we were scolded and punished, so those tasks started bringing some negative psychological baggage with them.
Now that we’re adults, we are the ones giving ourselves tasks. That doesn’t mean that the psychological baggage is gone, though. Sure, we can overcome it, either by driving ourselves harder, or by using psychological tricks, but that still doesn’t change the fact that it is hard. The more that we push the mental baggage uphill, the harder it is to push until we let it slip away from us, just like Sisyphus had the task to push a stone up a mountain, but each time he neared the top, it would roll back down.
Practice, on the other hand, doesn’t have all of this messy baggage. If we mess up while we’re practicing, we can just pick ourselves up and dust off. We don’t have to go back, wallow in our failure, and start all over again from the bottom. If I look at these blog posts as practice, for some future, extraordinary posting that will somehow change everybody’s life, it doesn’t matter if I have a couple of typos or an incomplete sentence, because I’m only practicing. It doesn’t matter if I get as much traffic as my server can handle. Failure doesn’t matter one bit, and I’ve actually failed twice, maybe three times already. The first “failure” was my choice of topics, general questions. I learned from that, that I can’t keep my interest up when I’m writing about random facts. The second “failure” was my first long run without posting. I learned that even if I’m not regularly updating, that I can keep my mind on what I want to write about in the future. The third “failure,” and probably the most devastating, was when I learned the hard lesson about backing up my information regularly. If I had the mindset that these were tasks that I must accomplish, the first failure might have been fatal to this blog, the second, most probably, and the server crash would have almost certainly kept me from bringing it back up.
Since I’m practicing, the only way that I can fail is if I either stop practicing, or if I stop learning. After I’ve been practicing long enough for something to start becoming a habit, it is time to evaluate what I’m doing and see how I can improve. I then practice those improvements until they start becoming habit, then re-evaluate my methods, selecting other ways to improve. This is an endless cycle, but since we’re only practicing, it isn’t daunting at all. What are we practicing for? Well, we’re practicing improvement, since we can’t practice perfection. If we look at our entire lives as practice for making habits, then why not set up a habit of improving how we practice?
The Conclusion (finally)
To conclude (isn’t it odd how conclusions tend to start with those two words?), practice makes habits, not perfection. With that piece of knowledge, we can take some of the emotional edge out of practicing, which lets us go ahead and use practicing as a tool for our personal development. We can easily replace “doing” with “practicing” in our decision making, since it is a lot easier to bring ourselves to practice.
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