Practice Does Not Make Perfect

Only perfect practice does, and here’s how you do it.

Many people believe they are born to lead successful lives in life. They train habitually, practice day-to-day, but somehow along the way, their conditions lead them to failure.

Oftentimes I’ve heard statements like, “Oh, this person is so lucky, she touches dirt, and it turns to gold.” or, “Well, he is unlucky, no matter what he touches, it turns to dirt.”

But this is fundamentally wrong.

People become superstitious when they wrongly identify the cause of a particular effect. Not that I hate superstitions, but those statements are far from true.

I know that to some extent; we are being conditioned by our environment, especially the influence of media that affects our brain’s functions and governs our behavior.

But that’s just one factor in the formula of “success” — which is subjectively defined by ourselves. Nevertheless, no matter what kind of success we want in life, it’s our responsibility to condition ourselves.

We’ve long believed that mastery of skill results from the effort a person has put in. We’ve heard the adage, “Practice makes perfect.” repeated everywhere.

You may ask, isn’t the idea of “practice makes perfect” is common sense? Isn’t it obvious that the more time we spend practicing to get better at something, the more proficient we’ll become? Well, yes, it seems obvious and I agree it makes perfect sense. But common sense isn’t always correct.

The problem with that statement is that it is missing the most important point. No matter how many hours of practice we do, we will only remain in stagnation if we never learn.

Researchers have found that the amount of deliberate practice in which someone engages explains only 12% of the variance in the quality of performance. So what are the other factors that explain the 88%? It’s habits, character, intrinsic motivation, mental capacity, and many other things.

Successful people or professionals make things look easy because they have mastered the fundamentals of whatever they do. They have learned from their past mistakes and found better ways to succeed, not because they simply got lucky.

Unfortunately, not everyone can evaluate past mistakes, let alone learn from them. Then they choose the simple explanation and merely blame it on fate or destiny, without knowing that only practice is not enough, it’s the perfect practice that makes perfect.

Perfect practice starts from habit

Once I knew a guy who had a fairly good social circle. Many people admired him. What people didn’t know is he liked to lie in minor circumstances.

It looked harmless at first. But when he was dealing with a major problem, he couldn’t handle it positively. He would dance around the bush and go round in circles rather than be straightforward and tell the truth.

His lying behavior has become a habit. He has practiced it so many times that it becomes automatic for him to lie.

This is an example of how something that we practice for a long time can be deeply ingrained in our system and make a habit. Just like plowing a field, cultivating a habit takes time and grows from within.

The perfect practice crates from the habits that we do repeatedly. And in my friend’s case — he had the habit of lying and had become excellent in it.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

— Aristotle

Your habit creates your character

Everyone has certain traits that distinguish the quality or characteristics of a person. These traits are not coincidences; they are results from constant training, both mental and physical.

When we face adversity, our traits are the things that we have practiced over time, regardless of whether it’s positive or negative.

If we practice negative traits — such as cowardice or dishonesty in minor events — we couldn’t handle the major ones positively because it’s not what we have practiced all this time. That’s why when we permit in telling a lie once, it will be a lot easier to do the second, third, fourth time until it becomes a habit.

Epictetus once said, “All philosophy lies in two words, sustain and abstain.”

It works in the fundamental of success, too; that is from sustaining what needs to be done and abstaining from what is detrimental until this becomes habitual.

Our habits create our character. Traits are shaped by inheritance, environmental factors, and can also change across our life span depending on how well we develop our character.

All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision.

— James Clear

Your character creates your destiny

As human beings, we base our memory on scripts and the generalization of scripts. Memory itself is the ability to remember experiences, and it’s essential to learn.

We learn a new language by studying it, but then we speak it by using our memory to retrieve the words that we have learned.

In other words, we learn how to do things by memorizing what we have learned and then relearn from it. And when we learn, we form our thinking patterns into behavioral habits.

By behaving courageously, we learn bravery. By practicing clarity, we learn honesty. By behaving responsibly, we learn integrity. By practicing these traits, we master them. Consequently, we learn by doing.

These behavior patterns create our character, and our character leads to destiny.

“Watch your character for your character is your destiny.”

— Winston Churchill

Final thoughts

Practice does not make perfect, it only makes permanent whatever we do repeatedly. Therefore, only perfect practice makes perfect.

The perfect practice is the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn. If we want to do anything well, we have to learn from past mistakes, unlearn the old method that doesn’t work, and relearn the better ways. We need to do this mental process repeatedly until it becomes a habit.

In a nutshell, our habits will form our character, and our character is the overall assessment of our qualities that will lead us to perfection.