The Unusually Valuable Thing Most People Forget After Learning
Take aim. Fire. Repeat. Part 3 of 4.
Summary
🎯🎯 Target your practice: When you improve your weakest link you improve the whole.
📅 🗓️ Schedule your practice: Schedules take out the need to rely on willpower or inspiration.
💯😇 Be honest with yourself: You must acknowledge weaknesses to target them.
You planned, and you learned something new. Now it’s time to make sure you don’t forget. It’s time to practice. It sounds simple: take action. But is that all it is?
Great aim, poor shot
There’s a danish saying: Sigter godt, men rammer skidt.
Loosely translated it means: great aim, poor shot. It’s the idea that your effort doesn’t lead to the intended outcome. Your execution fails.
We want to avoid that.
If you're trying to play a new song on guitar, and you know you struggle with that one chord progression in the chorus, why replay the whole song?
Focus. Target that weak point, attack it. Repeatedly. Slow it down, get it up to speed. Come back to the full song after you’ve got that part handled.
Practice with a simple goal—improving weak points.
Have you ever learned something the wrong way? You learn a specific action incorrectly, committing it to muscle memory, reinforcing it. It’s difficult to unlearn that type of error.
Target it before it gets too ingrained.
Divide & conquer
Targeted practice requires dividing and conquering.
Break your skill into smaller components. That way it’s easy to target the parts that you struggle with. It’s not hard, but it might be a little tedious.
Improve the weakest link, improve the whole.
Just adding hours doesn’t ensure improvement—that’s just going through the motions, enforcing bad habits. Take it slow, do it right, target weak spots, be patient.
Another way you might practice is to interleave practice. Instead of sequentially “completing” one skill, mix it up. Practice one skill for a while, then another, then a third. Go back and forth.
Remember though, this isn’t multi-tasking.
Skills aren’t isolated—they’re parts of a whole. Interleaved practice makes creating connections between parts easier. This facilitates learning and improves retention.
Rep it out, lightweight baby
If you were forced to either:
listen to a tape of your dad telling you what the purpose of that one tool is 300 times in one hour
or listen to him tell you its purpose 300 days in a row
Which method do you think would be most effective for retaining that information?
Well, I, for one, would be bored, frustrated and angry with the first approach. It makes you obstinate.
I GET IT, DAD. I HEARD YOU THE FIRST 257 TIMES.
The other approach is known as spaced repetition.
Spaced repetition is reviewing newly introduced and more difficult concepts more frequently, and older, easier concepts less frequently, while spacing it out in systematic intervals.
At the beginning, the intervals between reviews are short—and then they gradually grow longer.
This exploits the spacing effect: that learning is more effective when study sessions are spaced out. Languages are obvious candidates for employing spaced repetition.
Scheduling practice
I know many have an idea that their willpower is the stuff of legends. I certainly used to. My willpower was so strong, I could do anything—and I never needed to make things easier for myself.
How stupid is that? Just typing that makes me cringe.
It’s a losing formula. You cannot depend on willpower and inspiration to get consistent practice. Create a schedule to practice!
And do your damnedest to adhere to that schedule.
The schedule should only change if absolutely necessary—not because it’s a full moon, your toenail feels weird or your dog’s girlfriend’s owner’s second cousin got a speeding ticket.
There will be temptations. Friends who want to socialize, shows to watch. I’m not saying you should cut it all (God no), but treat practice time with respect. If it’s truly your priority, make it so. You’re seeing to your needs, and you can’t say yes to everything.
And as long as you don't use it as an excuse to neglect them, those you care about will respect your needs, even encourage them.
Bursts of effort create bursts of progress
Try to keep your practice to short bursts of effort. This lets you easily schedule practice on consecutive days, enhancing your results through spaced repetition and interleaved practice.
Here’s how you might schedule a week learning some object-oriented programming concepts:
Monday, 10AM: Learn about polymorphism, interfaces and encapsulation, accumulate notes.
Monday, 10PM: Review notes for 15 minutes before bed using active recall (test yourself instead of passively reading), interleaving all topics
Tuesday, 10AM: Try to recall information from notes
Go through the notes afterward to see what you missed
Make a new note to target these areas
Tuesday, 09PM: Review notes for 15 minutes before bed using active recall targeting weak areas
Wednesday, 12PM: Practice based on spaced repetition for 10 minutes
Thursday; 12PM: Review notes for 15 minutes using active recall
Friday, 10AM: Practice based on spaced repetition for 10 minutes
This might seem daunting, but notice that each session is short. Focus on frequency when learning. There’s no reason every study session must be a 9 hour long mega grind. You won’t retain the majority of the information anyway, and it only makes it much harder to get started.
Don’t measure the hours you spend, measure the times you practice.
Be honest with yourself
The most important aspect of practice is honesty. If you can’t be honest with yourself, you can’t target weaknesses. Just like you must realize you’re probably not a smart as you think, you must realize you’re not gonna be good at everything from the jump.
The longer you wait to face something, the larger the shadow grows.
That danish saying I mentioned earlier? A second line is often added to create a rhyme: det gør idioter rigtigt tit.
Translated, with a little creative freedom: Great aim, poor shot. That's an idiot’s way, more often than not.
Here’s one note I want to highlight, one quote to make you ponder and one post/note from another creator I enjoyed this week.
The Note
The Quote
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn - Alvin Toffler
The Promote
This week, I particularly enjoyed Benjamin Antoine of The 2hour Creator Stack writing about being lost and searching for purpose:
Thank you for the kind promo. I also really like that quote from Alvin Toffler