Practice DOESN'T Make Perfect: 7 Tips to make your Practice Count
Three resources I've found really helpful in my study of Practice and Learning things, in general, are Atomic Habits by James Clear, Learn Better by Ulrich Boser, and Ira Glass's talk on Making Art
Tips for better practice
Make it easy to practice
Put your instrument and practice materials in a common area that's easy to reach and provides a visual cue to remember to practice
Keep a clean, well-organized space to make practice easy and enjoyable
Have a plan for practice
Schedule time to practice
Know EXACTLY how you'll spend that practice time - unfocused practice is wasted time
Remember your WHY for practicing every time you practice
Why did you start?
Where do you want to go?
Set small, measurable targets for your practice times
Break up large goals into smaller, very specific, attainable goals
Build regular feedback into your practice routine
Seek mentorship, accountability, lessons
Don't have those things? Watch the experts- find them on YouTube, read books, blogs, film yourself, practice in a mirror, teach your kid, your spouse, your neighbor, explain new concepts to your dog or anyone else who will listen.
Become your own feedback loop
Use timers
Keep notes on your practice, reflect on wasted effort, time, movement,
Create systems to facilitate improvement- rearrange workspace, remove distractions, reflect on and eliminate barriers to entry
Find a team to practice with!
Team learning offers the combined intelligence of a team to grow.
Feedback happens faster/more naturally, shared goals increase motivation for all involved parties, natural accountability abounds
Understand the difference between familiarity with a concept and having a deep understanding/knowledge of a concept
Eliminate overconfidence and minimize the occurrence of mistakes that cause extreme confidence-crashes and the likelihood of abandoning the practice habit that accompanies crashing.
Reward yourself for practice
Reward yourself with a favorite activity AFTER you practice
like a bowl of ice cream
or 30 mins of guilt-free tv time
a favorite outing every week/month/year of successful practice
As an incentive/motivator for those times you don't feel like practicing.
Contrary to common belief, practice does not make perfect, practice makes permanent. For a practice to be effective, certain things need to be built into our practice time, and these things translate no matter what we are practicing, from cooking to woodwork to playing mandolin.
If you've been following me for a while, you probably know that I play the mandolin. What you might not know is that I also "play" 30 other instruments. Three years ago, I was on the verge of quitting playing music altogether because years and years of practice had made me no better at any one of them. As part of a much larger life-realization (which we don't need to go into here), I decided to pick one thing and focus on truly mastering it. I was to take lessons and schedule focused practice time, and by golly, I was going to become a fantastic mandolin player.
How's that going? Read on.
I picked up my first instrument when I was five years old. My parents are both musicians and I'm sure as a result, I had some natural proclivity towards it. With music, I got very good at pattern recognition. I could pick out songs by ear fairly easily, and figured out how certain patterns translated from instrument to instrument, which had me able to pick out a few impressive tunes on almost 30 different types of instruments by the time I was 15. I spent untold thousands of hours practicing music in my young life, but I exited childhood with some fascinating party tricks and no actual musical skill of which to speak. I had tried. I had tried SO HARD!
To be better "practicers," we need to understand a few things: how to learn new things, how to create positive habit formation, and, if we want to master anything, it's also hugely important to understand how learning works.
Learning new things and sticking it out through the plateaus and crashes that accompany the learning process requires a whole lot more than an initial spark of interest. That initial spark will often give us the motivation we need to get familiar with a subject, but there's a big space between being familiar with and true knowledge of any subject. Take people for example. What's the difference between recognizing your neighbor at the grocery store and knowing what their childhood was like, what get's them truly excited, and what triggers them in an argument? When people are learning new skills, they often mistake familiarity with knowledge and learning to identify when that mistake is taking place, and knowing how and what to practice is the only way anyone, with natural proclivity or none, can truly master anything.
When I started intentionally practicing the mandolin, I also started learning music theory. At first, it was super easy for me to recognize the patterns on the fretboard and to transpose little ditties I'd played a thousand times because I could play by ear, and I knew exactly how they should sound no matter the key. But at the time, I couldn't read music and while I had a fairly good intuitive sense about how music should work and sound, I didn't know the theory, the why's and hows of music. I started looking at chord theory and step-progressions on paper and built a familiarity on the subject (basic word/picture association), and that the common mistake of familiarity over the kind of knowledge that would make transposition automatic, caused me to skip the very important, intentional practice process involved in actually internalizing that knowledge. Practicing, studying, repeating, quizzing myself, challenging myself with different applications, or different presentations of the subject matter. Taking measurable, actionable steps like spending 15 minutes of my daily practice time to practice pentatonic scales in five different keys, out of order, consistently over many repeated practice sessions would have helped me internalize my knowledge about music theory and make the associated finger movements on my mandolin automatic. Glancing over a series of resources on music theory helped me to become familiar with the concept, but the knowledge wasn't ingrained, wasn't second nature, wasn't automatic.
After some time spent in daily practice, I was in a group of friends playing a song I wasn't super familiar with, and they said "Hey, let's play this song in A instead of E." I'd been studying chord charts and chord theory, but here, outside my printed resources and predictable applications, I got my butt handed to me. I'd come into that jam session with a huge head, telling them I couldn't wait to show them the new things I'd learned, that I'd been practicing regularly and that they'd be so impressed, it would FINALLY be different to play with them because I finally understood what I was doing... but then my performance didn't match the buildup I'd had in my head. The inevitable confidence dip that happened (and had been in the past) could have caused an existential crisis because "I didn't know what I thought I knew, and this was way harder than I thought, I don't know what I did wrong or what to do differently or where to turn to improve, so I should probably just quit because I'm not cut out to be a musician, and I'll never improve because I have tried and tried and tried and it's never worked." This is a completely understandable emotional response to a dip in confidence, and that emotion must be countered with an understanding of what was actually at the root of that failure: unfocused practice and the lack of a feedback loop in what and how I was practicing the mandolin and learning music theory.
What is a feedback loop you might ask? A feedback loop can come in the form of taking classes or lessons, mentorship from masters, even challenging yourself to teach or explain the things you're learning to others. A lot of people get stuck here because they can't afford to take lessons, can't get time off work for classes, don't know someone who can mentor them, _____fill-in your own reasons here. While mentorship by a master is the fastest way to get feedback on how you are doing, how your skills or knowledge acquisition is progressing, to get guidance on what next steps to take or techniques to practice, it is not the only way. If you don't have access to a mentor or can't take classes, you'll have to get creative in creating your own feedback loops. Get a physical timer, start a journal, keep records of your habits and movements. Look for inefficiencies. Self-evaluate. What seems to be working for you? Do more of that. What doesn't work for you? Ask yourself “Why?” and find another method. Where can you shave off some time, what systems can you create to make certain aspects of practice more realistic? How can you remove barriers to entry when it comes to sitting down to practice? If you don't have in-person mentors, immerse yourself in the topic at hand. Read what the experts have to say. Watch videos of the experts in action. Slow those videos down. Observe their movements, their fluency, and reflect it on your movements and improve your fluency by mimicking theirs. Film yourself. Watch it back frame by frame. Practice with a mirror. Set targets. Small, specific, measurable, realistic, attainable tasks that break up larger goals into more realistic, digestible segments. Spend your practice time focused on tackling those small tasks and check-in with yourself about how you're doing and how you're improving and how you could do better in every practice session.
If you haven't already surmised this, I was a really weird kid, and I didn't have many friends. I spent an enormous amount of time alone and music was both my creative outlet and my escape. But because I played alone, and did so for literally thousands of hours, without feedback, I developed some truly horrible habits. I invested my own time signatures, and learned hundreds of songs "by ear," but didn't play along with the records, so I had the basic tunes right, but the time signature wrong. So then on the seldom opportunity I did get to play music with other people, it was impossible because they were playing by a set of rules I didn't have in my playbook, and my bad habits were so ingrained by so much poor practice, they were nearly impossible to correct.
With music, jamming with friends or playing in a band can serve two purposes, team learning, which offers the combined intelligence of a team to grow at an accelerated pace; shared goals increase everyone's motivation to grow and to improve, and there is a constant feedback loop within the band- if someone is playing out of time or off-key, it (hopefully) becomes readily apparent and those issues can get addressed and dealt with right away. Team learning can happen in a classroom, in a band, in the workplace, at home with your kids or your spouse, with friends...
Great learners make great teachers. Something I've found to be incredibly helpful as I've been learning new skills is turning right around and teaching the things I'm learning to others. That helps solidify and ingrain the information I've just learned as well as reflect weak points or missing pieces in my learning. Finding I can't explain concepts clearly or concisely is a reflection that I've got more studying to do. When my "students" struggle to understand or replicate what I'm trying to teach them, it allows me to find ways to make the information more digestible or relatable to them, which also further ingrains the knowledge into me. Watching multiple students attempt things I've taught them, each with their understanding and own skillsets allows me to see all kinds of different mistakes happen before my eyes, and then I get to figure out how to help them fix those mistakes. This accelerates the learning process tenfold. If I'm teaching something I'm passionate about, that passion and motivation to continue learning are accelerated in a classroom setting. Celebrating successes and working as a team to fix mistakes gives people a sense of purpose and satisfaction paralleled by few other experiences in life.
An understanding of how the learning process works is hugely important if we want to learn things, especially if we want to learn things that don't come naturally to us or things that we may not have an inherent interest in learning. My business partner Josh Nava introduced me to the Learning Curve a while back, which REALLY helped give context to a lot of my past learning experiences of why I’ve excelled in some areas, and why I've failed and/or given up in others. It's also allowed me to give myself some grace in some of those failures because I can now attribute that failure to more than just "I wasn't self-disciplined enough, I didn't try hard enough, or I didn't care enough" to push through the hard parts.
What I think most people would be surprised to find is that the learning curve is not a steady, solid line to total mastery of a skill if you just have enough self-discipline and willpower to get to the top. We all start a new skill at the Unconscious Incompetence stage, where we know that we don't know something. Oftentimes, we have a quick sprint to a basic level of competence in a skill because the excitement or honeymoon phase of learning a new skill propels our initial learning at a remarkable pace. We often have a few successes here that give us the confidence to keep moving forward. Good practice habits and positive learning tend to fall off when a false sense of confidence forms as a result of those first few wins.
Where people start to fall short in actual skill acquisition and positive practice technique is in their understanding of the difference between familiarity with a term, skill, or practice and actual understanding of and mastery of that skill. This overconfidence often causes us to bite off more than we can chew, and then we get stuck or worse; get a rude awakening to the fact that we know WAY less than we thought we knew, and that hit to our confidence will often cause us to abandon that learning or practice altogether.
This is exactly what happened with me and to the 29 of the 30 instruments I play. I have an extremely active mind. Having outlets for my creativity, and making or producing things is what fuels my fires. Without financial resources, mentorship, space for tools, etc., to physically make things as an outlet, music fills a lot of those voids. I was initially drawn to music because it was a relatively accessible, portable creative outlet, but what made it truly exciting to me was the way that it felt to play music with other people. Ironically, the latter is actually what almost made me quit playing music altogether. Having successful musical interactions was the best feeling I'd ever experienced, but unfocused practice led me to develop some seriously bad habits over the years, and that made unsuccessful musical interactions with others increasingly frequent to the point that I truly no longer enjoyed it. Not understanding what exactly was going wrong or how to change it while still trying to power my way through unenjoyable practice frayed my self-confidence and motivation to continue practicing.
What ultimately made playing the mandolin different from all those other instruments was gaining an understanding of the learning process, finding mentorship and accountability, making it easy to practice, setting small, measurable goals for my practice time, filtering everything I was doing through a feedback loop in the form of taking lessons, playing with friends, playing along with records, building rewards into my practice schedule, and taking every opportunity I could to turn around and teach the things I was learning. Realizing the difference between familiarity and understanding, retaining sight of my long-term goals, and immersing myself in the field, constantly looking for inspiration and encouragement helped me through the plateaus, peaks, and valleys and stay consistent with a task for almost three years. I practiced mandolin for an hour a day every single day for three years, literally the first and only thing I've ever been able to dedicate myself in that way in my entire 33 years on this planet.
I've seen vast improvement, I've seen the peaks and valleys, but a HUGE disruption came into my routine when moving across the country from Seattle to Nashville causing me to drop the habit entirely. And that is where we get into the importance of habit formation and, of course, an understanding of how good habits are formed, but that, my friends, is another topic for another day.