Purposeful Practice I

The key to excellence is practice, and you’re probably doing it wrong. Most people are. The fact is that talent, if it even exists, is highly overrated. This means that you can truly do anything with your music — but at an incredible investment.

There is no gene or innate musical talent that will carry you to greatness. In all areas of performance, it comes down to how you practice.

Practice not only matters, but determines everything. There is one thing that distinguishes experts, truly the very best in any field, from everyone else. And it isn’t talent, size, strength, agility, or some innate gift. It is the amount of time they spent in deliberate practice.

Talent, or early demonstration of skills, can be nothing more than a self-fulfilling prophesy. If you assume that someone doesn’t have the musical or athletic gift because he or she doesn’t excel right away, he or she is often encouraged to go in another direction. Children with musical skill early on earn more compliments, attention, and investment from parents, teachers and their peers. Without encouragement, a late bloomer never learns to play or sing.

We now know that it is only the right kind of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time that leads to improvement. There is no such thing as predefined ability.

Purposeful practice has very specific, well-defined goals. You have to know exactly what you want to accomplish with every repetition —know what you want to do and exactly how you want to do it, ideally based on how experts do it.

Purposeful practice has very specific, well-defined goals. You have to know exactly what you want to accomplish with every repetition—know what you want to do and exactly how you want to do it, ideally based on how experts do it.

Contrast this with ‘naive practice’ (a term first used by sports psychologists), where we do something repeatedly, expecting that the repetition alone will improve performance.

Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Only perfect practice makes perfect. Without knowing exactly what you want to do, you aren’t progressing.

Read more about purposeful practising in my next blog: 'Purposeful Practice II.'