Not All Practice Makes Perfect

agreed, practicing slow enough to get it right is the most important thing for sure. once thats in the bag, then the problem becomes getting it up to speed, and techniques you were using at the slow pace can be non-viable past certain tempos. for me, getting it up to speed involves constantly interspersing the slow flawless practice with attempts that are right on the threshold of what i can do, tempo wise.

Not a proficient musician by any stretch of metrics/imagination. But adding onto learning new pieces, what worked for me personally is hearing the parts in the original recording, and singing the melody with my voice if it's melody or vocalizing and tapping the rhythm with my whole body (foot and spine engaged) if it's a rhythm pattern.

That way, when I am playing my instrument when that problematic measure comes, I'll simultaneously sing out the melody or tap out the rhythm; and even if my technique is poor and can't play the fast series 16th notes, I'll hear the correct melody/rhythm/gestalt in my head and what I am off by and try again.

This happens in learning new languages as well , often speaking quickly the wrong way is counter productive. Speak very slowly at first and focus on being correct

A coach I knew used to say "you play how you practice" i.e. if you show up and just go through the motions at practice, you will play the same way.

Something else that really helps is backchaining.

Split the thing you are learning into chunks... making each chunk as small/simple/easy as you can.

Learn the chunks in reverse order. Starting with chunk N, then N-1, all the way to chunk 1. This way, you always start with the hardest part and then move onto the easier (more practiced) parts.

This keeps the focus on the part you are trying to learn, and reduces learning stress.

I was going to make a similar comment but take it a different direction. With sports, just like with music or anything else, you need to understand the context and reasoning behind skills training. A lot of people -- for example, playground ballers -- are awesome basketball players, but they're awesome at 1-on-1 and if you throw them into a structured, officiated game they'll contribute far below their raw abilities. Football is probably even more extreme.

With anything, you need to practice & study with intent, and with almost everything, having a coach/teacher/mentor/guide makes this much, much easier.

Followed by "Perfect practice makes perfect."

Oh, you're very welcome. This paper sent me down the rabbit hole: after graduating as an incompetent Electronics Engineer, I thought about the essence of competence and I stumbled upon this article. I'm always happy when I find a resource that addresses an abstract idea I'm thinking about but can't formulate for two main reasons: it always opens a door -if it has a name, it can be searched effectively- and it always amazes me how come I didn't think of it before.

For instance, after graduation, I read a book titled "How to Study in College". Why didn't I ask such an obvious question before. I learned many things, one of which is the Cornell Note-taking method.

I've always been interested in how to search for, acquire, and keep knowledge, how to apply it, how to manage it, and how to track its evolution -mental breadcrumbs, which idea lead to the other?-

So it got me interested in how memory works: how we forget, how we remember, and what to do about it. It led to Hermann Ebbinghaus and "spaced repetition". I wasn't satisfied, though, for I wanted to know the underlying brain processes. The neuroscience behind it. This led me to Hebbian Theory and the concept of Long Term Potentiation. (The Brain from Top to Bottom - http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/) which frankly blew my mind to a thousand shards: memory viewed in terms of ions. (Here's a very nice video from Carleton College "Neuroscience - Long-Term Potentiation" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vso9jgfpI_c) and here's a good presentation by Carleton's Dr. Matthew Hollahan: ("How We Can Improve Memory": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXX58QhNfjc)

In the meantime, I put a name on the discipline: Cognition/Cognitive psychology, etc..

That was good, but I still wanted to think about it in a "meta" way. Some overarching theme or discipline that englobes other things I might be missing. After some time, though, I stumbled on "metacognition", and here's where it's truly amazing how the mind works: How didn't I make the connection before between "cognition" and "meta-cognition" even though "meta" was the very word I used to think about it. It's the very thinking about thinking and was humbled because I missed such an obvious link. I have already met that word before and read about it, but it didn't "click" until that very moment.

This has also driven me to think about "learning" in a larger context: learning organization and learning countries. Why are some countries more evolved than others, etc. (Which led me to a book titled "Why Nations Fail" (again, how on Earth did I miss such an obvious question). How can we make poor countries better, or asked from another perspective: in a post-apocalyptic world where all countries are the same, what would we do to rebuild civilization? How to bootstrap civilization? Can we take those steps and apply them on difficult countries. (Bill Gates was on Jimmy Fallon and the latter asked a marvelous, in its form, question: How do you solve a poor country?).

It got me thinking about the necessity of having some conditions A and B present to have X and those conditions being absent in poor countries, you can't have X. It then got me thinking about it backwards: Given C and D, can we get Y that's either a substitute for X or something at least better than nothing. First thing that popped in my mind was the Apollo 13 carbon dioxide filter hacking. After some time, I stumbled across an article titled "The Genius of the Tinkerer" [http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487039893045755037...] and it appears there is a company called "Design that Matters" that does just that. It also was interesting to see the Apollo 13 feat mentioned. Steven Johnson has also some talks on Youtube and a book titled "Where Good Ideas Come From".

Anyway, the point is you never know where a piece of content can lead to and it can be frustrating to forget some of those references or the title of an article.

Here are some useful resources, too:

[Book]: The Complete Problem Solver - John R. Hayes. [Book]: Make it Stick, The Science of Successful Learning - Peter Brown et al. [Video]: Study Less, Study Smart - Marty Lobdell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlU-zDU6aQ0).

That's a valid point. I didn't hold it against him, though: as a reader, I can skim through but someone who's not familiar with it could appreciate the verbosity.

I wasn't aware of that book, thanks for the title! Sorry for the late reply.

In other articles I've read about deliberate practice, the other elements include:

1. Maintaining a difficulty level that is just barely out of your comfort zone: not so hard that you flail wildly, but not so easy that it's trivial. This is touched upon in the article, but presumably "deliberate" practice also deliberately adjusts the difficulty level in response to performance.

2. Mindfulness while you're practicing. The description of "purposeful" practice in the article mentions seeking out errors and correcting them after the fact. The descriptions of "deliberate" practice I've heard mentioned paying careful attention to your performance while you're practicing, so you can instantly correct or rehearse trouble spots. (And this requires a corresponding attention to the difficulty level so that you can spare this attention to avoiding & fixing mistakes.)

The article did not do a thorough job pointing to the new book: http://www.amazon.com/Peak-Secrets-New-Science-Expertise-ebo...

Also, I would recommend Moonwalking with Einstein which has fair bit of information on how to learn.

> Yes it's important to know the capabilites of your language and deployment stack -- but that just requires study, which in my mind is different from practice.

I agree. Which is maybe why Stackoverflow solves so many problems for a developer. You know what you want to do, you know how you want to do it. But you're stuck because you can't make sense of an API or don't know where to look for the functions you need.

It depends on what you're trying to learn with coding. I've recently had good success with this technique when applying it specifically to OpenGL. I've used a few specific parts of OpenGL extensively, and not used the rest of it very much at all. So I took some time to go through the Red Book examples very carefully and made sure I truly understood what they were doing. Then I wrote my own simple project using the techniques to make sure I understood them outside of the book. Then I started applying parts of them in my work at my job. Then I extended what we were doing in my work at my job by going a little further. And then I did it again going a little further still. It's been pretty effective.

That doesn't seem to me to be a directed, deliberate approach as the article implies is necessary. There's no way to know what patterns would be on the boundary of my skillset, so I might spend time using something that's unfamiliar but actually very basic which wouldn't challenge me, or something that's unfamiliar and incredibly difficult which would frustrate me because I couldn't make any progress. Isn't the reason that the system outlined in the article worked because the next level was always within reach but also something that provided a challenge? How do we get that in an arbitrary subject?

Essentially I wonder if the problem is that in some things we learn (eg coding) there isn't really a defined "ladder" that allows someone to practise harder and harder things in a deliberate way.

>You can certainly practice improving your mechanics, by which I mean your IDE/development environment whether it's keyboard shortcuts or workflow improvements.

Maybe practicing this allows you to get into the zone more easily since you won't be thinking about the mechanics. Getting into the zone more easily can lead to getting better and deeper understanding of the material.

A guitar player practices repetitive drills that aren't creative to help improve.

Quite sure that the link I found was not the one I was thinking of. But I believe it probably was a link concerning the same paper.