What I Learned Today

Learning a new physical skill is hard, and it takes time. Unlike acquiring a new concept, in which illumination can enter your brain in one dazzling flash, physical skills require time and repetition. There is a rule of thumb floating around that claims it takes ten thousand repetitions of some action to truly “learn” it. That’s a lot of repetitions, and can be a very daunting thought when faced with any particular skill-learning setting!

Ten thousand. Really? Let’s say I want to learn to produce a D major scale on my violin (which I do). Let’s further say that I dedicate myself to this goal by running through the scale ten times, every day. It will then take me *three years* to reach 10,000 repetitions. Somehow, I think the scale would have gotten as good as it’s going to get well before then.

But of course, the number of repetitions needed might well depend on the complexity of the particular task.

For now, in my violin studies, I prefer the approach advocated in The Secret of Practicing, Part 1. The idea here is that it’s not raw practice, but good practice, that helps you improve. Instead of executing something a fixed number of times (some or all of them poorly, since you haven’t mastered them yet), you aim to get five perfect repetitions. That might mean you actually practiced a lot more than that, but you got to the point where you could do five perfectly. This likely also requires breaking down the task (e.g., the sequence of notes) into a smaller and smaller unit until you can get five perfect repetitions. The other benefit is psychological: you get an immediate sense of where your current “ceiling” is, what you can do perfectly five times in a row, which should increase over time, rather than repeatedly throwing yourself at a big long complex piece and repeatedly failing. Maybe I can apply this strategy profitably with my swimming, too!

Part 2 of the series on practicing also recommends including overlaps between the chunks you’ve broken your piece into, which I think makes a lot of sense.

While the rest of this sequence on how to practice embarks on example pieces that are far outside of my playing ability, I’ve still enjoyed reading them to glean tips that may come in handy in the future. For example, I would have assumed that one would practice by playing the music as written, but these posts show how to break down the complexity of the music so you can work up to being able to play it. Great resource!