Perfect Practice

June 12, 2020

Practice is the most timeless of all human endeavors, a discipline that started, developed, and advanced civilization.  It transitioned us from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists and later into craftsmen, marksmen, and cooks.  Practice carries us through desperate times and prepares us for uncertain futures.  It is integral to our existence.

Regardless of one’s vocation, gender, age, or ethnicity, practice habits go far to determining their success or failure.  All people wish to excel in something, but ambition and willingness alone do not produce great outcomes.  When pursuits are misguided and misapplied they are unpowerful and inefficient.  Practicing is common, but expert practitioners are rare.

In all enterprises there are superior and inferior ways to pursue goals.  Spending extensive time approaching something wrong leads to marginal gains at best; more commonly, it is a pathway to failure.  Optimizing potential emanates not from practice, but instead perfect practice, an elusive habit that few individuals experience.  Practicing perfectly requires self-motivation, a willingness to embrace tedium, and deferring to experts.

Determination and enthusiasm come easily to individuals practicing their passion.  Possessing the desire and confidence to reach lofty goals, they can even derive pleasure from frustrations that inevitably arise during their pursuit.  The toil and every setback simply feels like necessary hurdles on their journey to greatness.  Unmotivated learners tend to resist practice the moment it becomes challenging and/or monotonous.  As a result, their success or lack thereof, becomes predicated on talent rather than grit.

Natural aptitude often leads to proficiency and – in rare cases – excellency, but the greatest athletes, musicians, artists, surgeons, masons, carpenters, teachers, and students are bound by having learned to practice perfectly, most often from an expert.  Perfect practice moves an individual from novice to competency to mastery.  Throughout this continuum, the learner needs guidance on what and how to practice.  Only a mentor who understands how to approach the discipline can provide it for them.

Before landing in the classroom, many great teachers were well-trained athletes, actors, or musicians.  Having benefited from perfect practice routines and observing a master instructor organize learners, these former performers are at an advantage when teaching students.  Armed with the aforementioned knowledge and experiences, the educators recognize that they can teach specific subjects while simultaneously addressing all academic and non-academic learning.  By deeply understanding the power of perfect practice, they use academic content as a catalyst to provide students with life’s most powerful discipline.  In the process, they help their students understand:

Hard work and perfect practice guarantee a person nothing, but without it, they have no chance of attaining greatness.

Developing perfect practice habits in one endeavor helps individuals master new ventures.  Having already worked as an understudy and pushed through tedious practice to attain goals, they can more easily apply learned habits to new skills and crafts.  Understanding the integrity of practice allows them to self-educate, providing limitless vistas of learning and the capability of passing along their knowledge to others.

Too often, American culture denigrates practice.  Marveling at natural ability is common, but praising accomplishments bred through hard work is not.  The former seems sexy, the latter hokey and antiquated.  We’re enthralled by preschool prodigies who can play Mozart or par championship golf courses, but are far less interested in the fourth chair flutist or varsity benchwarmer who practices two hours/day in the offseason to earn their unglamorous positions .  Sadly, this mentality filters into American schools.  That child is brilliant is commonly said in faculty rooms, but the same is not true for That child is a hard worker.

The best educators fight to change this mentality.  They effusively praise hard work and personal-best achievements, while avoiding words like Intelligence and Aptitude.  Knowing that confidence can lead to persistence, they create laddered assignments, so that every child will feel successful but also challenged.  Before and during independent practice, they remind their students:

Everyone needs to improve before the end of the class period.

In doing so, they create a persevering classroom culture.  Achievement differences persist, but all students are bound by a work ethic that maximizes their potential.  Children then carry this gift into other subjects, grades, and activities.  In doing so, the student/teacher relationship never ends.