Does Practice Really Make Perfect?

Or does imperfect practice merely ingrain poor performance?

A few years ago, I decided I set a goal to complete a triathlon. It was a pretty gutsy goal considering I didn’t know how to swim, and I was well past the age most humans learn this skill. Most people learn to swim at 5 and not 50 something.

Just to be clear, my goal was NOT a full triathlon, but a sprint. That meant I had to bike 12.4 miles, run, 3.1 miles and swim half a mile. I had been riding bikes since I was six, so that was OK. And I had completed multiple half marathons, so I knew I could do the 5 K run. But I found swimming daunting.

It has been my experience that striving for something hard becomes a growth experience on steroids. In this case, the learning about myself and how you acquire new skills greatly exceeded what I learned about swimming itself. My quest to learn to swim was a comeuppance about practice.

An incredibly wise women, my Mother, taught me that “Practice makes perfect.” However, after 5 months of diligent practice, I was not getting close to passable at reaching my goal to be able to swim half a mile. Perfection was not even close. I would have settled for describing my swimming as passable.

I began to see that although I was diligent in my practice, it was imperfect. I was perfecting imperfect technique — and only getting marginally better over time. My swimming was awkward and I was trying to muscle through, rather than improve my technique.

I then hired a personal coach, who in two sessions, moved my swimming skills farther than they had come in two months. 120 minutes of coaching moved my swimming skills further faster than all the previous 40 hours of time in the pool.

Following those two coaching sessions, I began to practice better, improve faster and se real progress.

Reflecting on the premise that practice makes perfect, I found several holes in the premise. If that was truly the case, my five months in the pool would have begun to yield results. The people in the job the longest, would be the best. Those that spend every spare hour shooting hoops would make the NBA> Clearly not my experience in swimming or in life.

I still believe that practice is the price you pay for excellence. However, there are two important aspect of practice that need to occur as well to improve your performance at any skill:

1. A skilled person who can show you the proper way early in your skill acquisition (unlearning bad behaviors is extraordinarily difficult).

2. A feedback mechanism (in my case, the coach) so that you get immediate feedback about what you are doing well and where you need to do something differently.

I had begun my quest to learn to swim in January and finally engaged a coach in May. The race was in August and I am pleased to report that I made it. I swam, I biked, I ran. I crossed the finish line and was not the last to finish (true confession — I was close to last). But I had done it!

I must admit that I’ve never done another sprint. But I have learned a lot about perfect practice that helps me over and over and over again in all aspects of my life.