How practice makes a man perfect (Researched Facts)

have your heard people saying, practice makes a man perfect? , we practice and Progress both are a very confusing Term— Practice makes a man perfect is what you have heard growing, Most of us doing work every day might think that we are making ourselves better each day, but the majority of the time we end up being in the same place over and over again.

But why? Let’s understand with the following example

-Suppose you want to learn about Digital Marketing, you took 2–3 online courses, and you are spending money, watching countless hours of videos. But still made zero progress, you still waiting for the right time to take actions. Whereas, someone else took a practical approach by starting to apply the Digital marketing things he had learned from free resources ( youtube ) into real-life practice like-starting a blog, building a website, starting a youtube channel, running online ads etc.

Excessive consumption makes your brain Dormant.

now, that you would assume that practicality is the best way to improve yourself, hold on. The most important one is to audit yourself and find out are you really making any progress or just working your ass off day in and day out.

how practice makes a man perfect

Yes, practice makes a man perfect, but you should know where you are putting in your output. Progress is slow, self-improvement is negligible to our eyes. So, you need deliberate practice. Deliberate practice means overcoming automaticity and new innovations to push performance higher. In other words, while you are practising your skillsets daily you also must find new innovative ideas to make it better and better every day, instead of repeating the same steps innovation should be applied.

Many people ask me that, why can’t I make myself better even if I try so hard?. The science behind why some people have extraordinary abilities — an area of research known as expert performance — seeks to answer that question. And psychologist K. Anders Ericsson is one of its leading scholars.

In an excerpt from his book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Ericsson writes,

Imagine what might be possible if we applied the techniques that have proved to be so effective in sports and music and chess to all the different types of learning that people do, from the education of schoolchildren to the training of doctors, engineers, pilots, business people, and workers of every sort. I believe that the dramatic improvements we have seen in those few fields over the past hundred years are achievable in pretty much every field if we apply the lessons that can be learned from studying the principles of effective practice.

Ericsson and his fellow researchers have studied top performers across many fields, from music to medical surgery, sports to software design. Data from decades of studies and their own laboratory experiments revealed a striking discovery: the best of the best tend to follow similar techniques for improving their abilities.

Ericsson’s insight was that practice had to be deliberate to provoke improvement. His research on violinists found that those who went on to become concert performers didn’t practice more, but the ratio of time spent in this deliberate practice to play was much higher. Practice makes a man perfect but you also need to be aware if the new innovated method to try.

The problem with traditional practice

We’ve all had to practice a skill at some point in our life Like— piano lessons, school sports teams, on-the-job training. You might connect the word “practice” with a never-ending repetition — piano scales, sports drills — and the frustration of not making much progress. There’s a reason so many people give up on learning a new skill or only reach a middling level of competence: surely, improvement stalls..

traditional practice does not work well in the long term because, just repeating a skill or task, even over a period of many years, doesn’t build expertise. That’s because once you reach a fair level of competence and are able to do what you need to do, the skill becomes automated. At best, you’re maintaining your abilities, but not improving them.

For most day-to-day tasks — driving, typing, cooking — this baseline, “good enough to get by” level of skill is fine. But if there’s something you really want to excel at, you have to push past that satisfactory stage and challenge yourself.

Here, we’ll look at 5 components of deliberate practice that you can use to get better at anything. These steps are based on Ericsson’s research about how people who are the best of the best in their fields learn and approach skills development. They’re principles that you can tap into to learn more quickly and meet more goals.

How Practice Makes A Man Perfect Using deliberate practice technique

1.Hop to more challenging environments—

Upping the challenge in a new situation, where you’re no longer adequate, is a good way to switch back to the fast part of the learning curve. Stretching yourself is the key to growth. But Ericsson emphasizes that when it comes to skills development, breaking out of your comfort zone isn’t about “trying harder,” but about “trying differently.” Your goals should teeter on the edge of what you are and aren’t capable of doing. If you can’t move forward with one technique or approach, try another and keep experimenting until you break through the barrier that’s blocking your path to improvement.

2.Breakthroughs come from new methods—

For goals to spur improvement, they need to constantly challenge your current abilities. Simply repeating skills you already know how to do — an unproductive cycle that’s easy to get stuck in with traditional approaches to practice — won’t actually enhance your skill level or improve performance.

Improvement comes in two flavors:

• Doing the same thing, but better.
• Doing a different thing, to get new results.

It’s important not to neglect the latter. Without new methods, you can easily get stuck improving something that’s obsolete.

3. Seek feedback

“Without feedback,” Ericsson says, “either from yourself or from outside observers — you can never figure out what you need to improve on or how close you are to reaching your goals.”

Feedback is essential for recognising scope for improvement and getting a realistic view of your progress. Whether one-on-one coaching with a teacher, mentor, or peer or some form of self-assessment, you need a means of pinpointing your strengths and weaknesses. This is the only way to know and work through trouble spots and advance from “just ok” to true mastery of a skill.

4. Find things you can do better in every attempt

The heart of the deliberate practice is focused attention on a specific area of improvement. In everyday things, there are thousands of details that contribute to the outcome. Don’t try to improve everything. Aim at a specific enhancement you could make each time. Every day, a small step can lead to a better Results—Just don’t get stuck in the same self-improvement plan looking to make yourself better

5. Set specific, realistic goals

Motivation also requires keeping your eyes on the prize. And vague aspirations like “getting better” at a certain skill aren’t going to cut it. Generic goals for improvement don’t give you any motivation to excel past your current abilities or help you measure your progress.

The deliberate practice depends on small, achievable, well-defined steps that help you work your way towards significant improvement. These steps should take into account your current knowledge and skill level and push those boundaries little by little, consistently expanding your abilities.

In Peak, Ericsson demonstrates the kind of specificity required with the example of someone who wants to improve their golf game:

If you’re a weekend golfer and you want to decrease your handicap by five strokes, that’s fine for an overall purpose, but it is not a well-defined, specific goal that can be used effectively for your practice. Break it down and make a plan: What exactly do you need to do to slice five strokes off your handicap? One goal might be to increase the number of drives landing in the fairway.

That’s a reasonably specific goal, but you need to break it down even more: What exactly will you do to increase the number of successful drives? You will need to figure out why so many of your drives are not landing in the fairway and address that by, for instance, working to reduce your tendency to hook the ball. How do you do that? An instructor can give you advice on how to change your swing motion in specific ways. And so on. The key thing is to take that general goal — get better — and turn it into something specific that you can work on with a realistic expectation of improvement.

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With deliberate practice, goal-setting isn’t like making a New Year’s resolution and hoping you’ll stick with it. It involves thoughtful planning, identifying scope for improvement and constructing a specific game plan for formulating on top of your current abilities.

Conclusion- In a Nutshell

Deliberate practice is a long-term investment in self-growth and leverages your capabilities. While we may not all have the makings of a professional athlete, elite musician, or business mogul, we can follow in the experts’ footsteps to learn more efficiently, work smarter, and develop or improve our skills.

As Ericsson told The New York Times, “a lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it.”

So no matter your pre-existing skill level, if you put in the time and effort to penetrate into the proven principles of deliberate practice, you’re sure to see some momentum. Like Susanne Bargmann and Bob Fisher — who put deliberate practice to the test and accomplished some extraordinary results — you may even surprise yourself with what you’re capable of.

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