Practice, Practice, Practice!

Practice Your Way to Near Perfection: A new meaning to "Practice Makes Perfect"

“Practice makes perfect”. You ever hear that expression? I’m sure you have but have you really applied it in your everyday life? Practice can be defined as rehearsing a behavior over and over again with one purpose in mind- to improve in an effort mastering that behavior. The more one practices, the better he becomes at that act. It’s simple. Put in the time and results will show. However, what doesn’t seem to be so simple is actually putting in the time to practice.

People just expect outrageous results immediately. For instance, there have been numerous occasions that I have gone to the driving range with friends who’ve rarely played the game, but they expect to hit the ball straight and far every time they swing the club. They get frustrated with themselves for not being able to do it, even if they’ve taken a six month hiatus from their last outing. Then they quit and do the same thing 3 months from that date. Is that sensible? No, but people do it all the time. We just expect the most of ourselves from anything and if not we get frustrated. We simply become aggravated and subsequently become discouraged from performing that activity again because we’re not good at it. You’ll never be good at anything if you approach your behaviors similarly. We’ve got to look past those initial performances, because in reality, how can we expect ourselves to be good at anything for the first time…or for the first hundred times for that matter.

Everything in life takes a lot of hard work. We need to plug away, hours and hours a day, at a particular activity to become even remotely good at it. People often forget that aspect of it…that we need to put in the effort and time in order to be successful…in anything. Can we expect to grow muscles by lifting weights for 45 minutes? No, but we can expect to build some muscle after working out for 45 minutes, 5 days a week religiously for 6 months. But even after that, you still need to constantly push yourself and keep plugging away every single day in the gym and throughout every meal in the kitchen to develop the physique you want. It takes hours and hours of practice, and even then we’ll never be perfect. Hey, even Tiger Woods doesn’t get it right all the time and he’s been swinging the club every day for hours a day since he could walk.  However, the key to success is striving for perfection. We’ll never be faultless in anything we do in life, but our goal ought to be to come as close to perfection as possible. In turn, this can only occur with plenty of preparation, intense practice with an incessant vigor to improve, and proper assessment of your activity. Each day of repeating the activity makes you one step closer to reaching that never-ending finish line of perfection.

So, approach everything in life as if it were learning a new language. Suppose you take up playing the piano. You cannot expect to know how to play your very first day. You cannot expect to know how to play even in a week or a month. It takes a very long time. Each day you pick up a little something new and after hundreds of days of performing the act, you develop a craft. However, do realize that each day is instrumental to your goal. Even if you didn’t improve in terms of results during that day (you’re going to have bad days) per se, you still pick up little tips and gain experience. Developing any ability is very analogous to learning a new language. Could you expect to learn Italian after only speaking it a few times? That is preposterous to even have it cross your mind. You need to speak for hours a day EVERY DAY; and you can’t let up by skipping a week here and there. You’ll never learn the language that way; and in turn, you’ll never be good at anything with that approach. Developing an ability is possible only through repetition. Recurrences of the activity are the only way you can actually retain something. Do you remember everything that you learned during your first semester economics class if you’re not an economist now. No, how could you?  Your memory fades when you don’t repeat the activity on a daily basis and your skill fades when you don’t work at it every day. If I was a dentist and I took a 5 year layoff, I can’t expect to come back to the job and know how to properly perform an implant. Complex activities like professions are not like riding a bike. They are something more.

They require an incessant vigor to improve each and every day. For instance, if you are a lawyer, you have clients who depend on you every day. They want you to represent them as they would represent themselves if they knew the legal system. They come to you to personify them. All of your legal decisions affect their life. They want the best representation possible and they want you to be right all of the time. After all, we are human though, and one can never get it right all of the time. Don’t expect to. But if you told your client I’m only right 80% of the time, do you think they would come to you. Of course, not. They want you to be right 100% of the time. We know that’s not possible, but we want to be as close to 100% as possible. We want to strive to be 100% even if we’ll never get there. Every day of practice gets us one step closer to that 100%. We just need to push ourselves to actually practice.

So heed to this advice and don’t become easily discouraged at something because you “weren’t any good at it”. No one is the first time. Be open to try new things. Open up to new behaviors. Undertake new activities and crafts. You won’t be good at them at first, but if you repeat the act indefinitely, you’ll eventually become good at that activity. Each successive act brings you that much closer to perfection, whereby you envision perfection as a long staircase that never ends; and each practice/rep of that activity is one step. You can never reach the top, but you can always be better off than you were before. So please don’t take the old saying of “practice makes perfect”literally. Because you never will be perfect. No one can be and no one can, in their right mind, expect to be. If you do expect to get everything right all the time, you’re setting yourself up for failure. No matter how much you practice, you can’t be perfect…But you can be pretty damn close. So take the saying of “practice makes perfect” to mean that practice takes you one step closer to perfection, whereupon you’re always striving to reach the top…through practice.

This is Muscle Prodigy…Do YOU Have What It Takes?