Why practice is boring (and why angles of practice matter, instead)
When you're learning a new skill, almost everyone will give you the same advice. Practice, practice, practice. And we do, but it doesn't always work, because it's boring. There is a way out, you know.
I must have been about 15 years old when I heard my neighbour studying.
I heard her because she was loud and somewhat repetitive.
"The battle of Panipat was fought in Panipat".
"The battle of Panipat was fought in Panipat".
"The battle of Panipat was fought in Panipat".
If you're smiling at how inane that sounds, then repetitive practice can feel just as silly.
When someone tells you to practice, the automatic reaction is to keep doing the same thing repeatedly. That's because the instructions you received weren't as good as they could be. For instance, let's say someone told you to take a picture of the beach. You're likely to whip out your phone and take the photo at an angle that most people do. If, on the other hand, you were given the task to take 200 pictures of the beach, it's unlikely you're going to keep your finger on the shutter.
After about ten pictures, you'd be likely to change your position.
How does the beach look when you're standing up? Or when you're lying down? What if you were to approach some tiny rocks and make them look huge? You'd end up doing what is done in many creativity classes. Illustrator Christoph Neimann talks about a project his class was given in school. All of the students were given an object. In this case, it was a clown's nose. Red and half-round, the students had to draw something around the shape.
The "clown's nose" became an eyepatch for a pirate, the protective mask for the fencers in a fencing match, a parachute, the udders of a cow, the sun on the Japanese flag, even an elephant eating half an apple. What seemed to be routine practice was neither boring nor repetitive. And yet the students were getting a lot of practice and, no doubt, a lot of laughs. Which is exactly the opposite of how we are told to practice. Our practise must be tedious and must sound like a chant.
"The battle of Panipat was fought in Panipat".
"The battle of Panipat was fought in Panipat".
"The battle of Panipat was fought in Panipat".
Until we run into angles of practice
We conduct a headline course every two years or so at Psychotactics. There are only so many elements to a headline, yet the course runs for between 8-10 weeks. Why doesn't everyone drop out from sheer boredom? It's because of how we tackle a headline, without necessarily writing 200 headlines the same way. When the clients learn the importance of "HOW" in the headline, we don't start with work headlines.
Instead, they make up a list of fun stuff, like dinosaurs and scallops.
A headline like: How dinosaurs eat scallops despite having no cutlery.
Or: How scallops rig football matches during the summer.
Sounds like the "battle of Panipat" to you, yet?
Of course not. As the course propels itself further, the clients deal with WHY and add details (e.g. Why dinosaurs eat a "high fat" diet to move faster). Once clients have had their fun, they're more eager to get to their business headlines. They've had angles of practice. And then, just for good measure, we get them to stop using HOW or WHY or DETAILS in their headlines. They realise that the absence of HOW, WHY and DETAILS are what causes a solid headline to crumple quite rapidly.
Angles of practice can improve almost any training.
All you need is to bazooka the monotonous activity. Instead of playing the same piano piece over and over again, how about increasing the speed a bit? Or decorate it with some synthesiser beats? How about slowing it down or throwing some weird stuff into the mix? In every instance, the tedious, repetitive method ends up being despised. Dread sets in, and some of us rise above that frustration, but that dread is almost always unnecessary.
Practice isn’t so much about memory. Instead, what practice tends to do is reduce the errors.
Which isn't to say that practise isn't needed
Practice may seem to enhance the memory, but that's just what you got told over and over again. Instead, what practice tends to do is reduce the errors. When you first ride a bicycle, let's say you make 54 ½ errors. As you keep riding, there's no memory stuff. It's not like Spanish vocabulary, where you can measure if you remember the word or not. With bicycle riding, it's all go, go, go. There's no way to know what you can recall and what you've forgotten.
However, what's happening is practice starts to eliminate the errors, one by one. The brain recognises the pattern (like it did with the HOW, WHY headlines) and starts to see what works and fails. As it goes through this routine, you learn to get a lot less wobbly until you're flying down the road. No parent teaches a kid to ride. All a parent does is scream and flail their arms madly. The brain works out the errors and fixes them based on complexity.
When you sit down to chant "Panipat, Panipat, Panipat", you're practising.
A TED video online will tell you that you're creating myelin and super speed highways in your brain. And you are doing just that. You're allowing your brain to remember what you're learning but doing so in a less tedious manner by using "angles of practice".
How can you bring in your version of a clown nose? How would you get your trainees to take 200 pictures by insisting that no two images are the same? What are you teaching today? Or what are you learning today? And how can you create angles of practice?
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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.