Practice, practice, practice. That's what most people will tell you if you want to learn something. But that's inherently misplaced advice. Practice is easily the most tedious way to learn anything. Practice is akin to fumbling in the dark. And talking about darkness, let's engage in a tiny exercise.
Let's say you came home in the dark, and I moved all your furniture. You'd keep falling over sofas, bumping into chairs and generally be pretty annoyed. The traditional concept of practice is all about entering that dark space repeatedly. In time, you're told, you'll know precisely where a sofa or chair is located, and you'll stop bumping into things. Depending on how much stuff got moved around, it might take you three-four, or ten tries.
And to me, that kind of practice is ridiculously inefficient. The better way is to know where the barriers are in the first place. To see where the mistakes are likely to be located, work on avoiding a single error at a time. Hence, let's say that a sofa is placed where there used to be space. You'll need to know that the couch is located in that spot, preferably in advance.
All you do is avoid that sofa. As you go back into the dark room, you learn where every barrier is and work your way around it.
If the two scenarios sound the same, they're not. In both cases, the brain is working out how to avoid the errors. However, in the second case, you already know where the errors are likely to occur in advance, and all you're doing is making sure you don't get stuck. The key to learning isn't in how-to as much as in knowing what to avoid (how-not-to).
This kind of mindless “how-to” practice is a waste of time. We are forced to employ the method because we aren't shown the landmines in advance. Hence we have to keep "blowing up" and "putting ourselves together".
We are then told we were "not born to do things" and other such rubbish. It's utter nonsense, of course. All we need is the error map. Once we get that, we avoid the errors.
But doesn't practice still matter? Yes, it does. Once you get past the barriers, you have fluency. But to get to a level of confidence and to create your style—that's where practice helps.
And it's a slightly magical system called "angles of practice". It doesn't sound like much, does it? Yet, as we all know, practice is tedious. What if we could tell which errors to avoid and remove a lot of the zzz aspects of practice?
Ooh. Let's look at that next time. This means you have to use your button-pressing skills to click on the subscribe button below :)
Blue, blue the sky is blue. So is the subscribe button right above you. Yes, that’s probably a good button to press because these rather unconventional (and sometimes, conventional) ideas will hurtle through cyberspace, right into your inbox. And you won’t feel so blue any more. :)
Oh, and if you want to know about me, me, me. I’m Sean D'Souza. Just another Kiwi who lives in middle Earth and enjoys the sweeping views of New Zealand. Oh, I’m a cartoonist too. And a writer, avid chef, but staying away from gardening and power tools. And um, I’d better stop. If you want to see some “very cool stuff” you should amble across to Psychotactics.com as well.
Hi Sean
Great article. Second one to comment :)
Let's say I want to learn karate or whatever. I would start by looking at the books / videos available.
However, there might not be any teachers showing what the landmines are
In this case, how to know what are the landmines in advance.? Do you have a way to uncover them?
This is great stuff Sean. Loving this new series.