Flirt with Disaster!

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Perfect Practice

There are certain pieces of advice in learning and education that you hear so frequently you think they must be true. You don't even question them.

One you hear again and again is "practice makes perfect." Yes, of course, you have to practice to get anywhere. You can't just dream about it; you have to do it.

But, this phrase implies "perfect" is the goal. Is it? Can you define "perfect?" In science and engineering, sure you can measure and say something is perfectly 5 nanometers thick. But in art or music? No. Perfect is subjective--it means something different to everyone. Yes, you can measure: that note is "perfectly" in-tune, or that rhythm falls precisely at beat 1 on microsecond 0. But, that perfect accuracy doesn't translate into a perfect experience for the audience.

People still love music made from before rhythm and pitch could be perfectly fitted to a grid or re-tuned. If perfect is the ultimate goal, why have people not stopped listening to old, imperfect stuff? Because "perfect" is not the goal in art and music. It's not the measured accuracy of music that makes it land with the listener. Listeners could say, "Finally, we have perfect music instead of that old trash!" But they don't.

So, why are people putting the idea of "perfect" into your head?

To make things worse, "practice makes perfect" is almost always followed up with someone chiming in, "Actually...perfect practice makes perfect."

People mean well when they say these things. Obviously, you don't want to memorize things using the wrong notes or wrong rhythms. That's good advice. But, we need to be careful throwing around this "perfect" word.

A lot of you mistake "perfect practice" to mean your attempts at something need to always be perfect. You feel like you need to be overly cautious; that you shouldn't exceed some boundary. That is not true. In fact, when learning and growing, it's the total opposite.

Failure is where it's at.

WD-40

Almost everybody knows of the famous blue spray-can WD-40. It's used for fixing things like squeaky door hinges and loosening rusted bolts. It was created by a chemist--Norman Lawson--in San Diego, CA in 1953. Why am I bringing up WD-40? Well, the name WD-40 stands for "Water Displacement formula #40." Norman failed at least 39 times before deciding formula #40 was the one. I don't know how long it took him, but Norman failed and failed and failed (okay, I'm not going to say it 39 times--you get the point).

Something you don't think about is usually you only get to see someone's success. Behind them, though, is a huge pile of failures and imperfect efforts that got them there.

Think about that. Your whole life you've only known Norman's 40th attempt and how great and useful it is. WD-40 is used every day all over the world because of someone's many "failures."

Most of your work is the repeated failure part. It's not the success part everyone eventually sees. When things go wrong remind yourself that that was just WD-24 or -25.

Learning to Walk

Let me give you another example of failing. At about 12 months old you thought, this crawling stuff is for babies, let me try this walking thing. You stood up, took a step or two and immediately fell on your face. You weren't thinking, "I need to take perfect steps." You kept trying to walk very poorly and failing again and again until, finally, you got the hang of walking. And, even to this day you might still not walk perfectly and occasionally stumble.

Think of a Tennis Player

Imagine how many times world champion tennis players have practiced their serve? They probably execute over a million serves in their lifetime. And, with all of that training and practice, they still aren't perfect every time! They may get their first serve in two-thirds of the time and may hit two bad ones in a row about 2 or 3% of the time.

Now in sports, you can measure perfect because it revolves around points and statistics. But, again, in music and art, there is no perfect. It's subjective.

The Sweet Spot

Some recent research on learning has come out that, for optimal learning, the sweet spot is working at about 85% accuracy. That means to learn things best, the difficulty of what you practice should have you getting it wrong or doing it poorly about 15% of the time. You don't want to practice around 100% accuracy--yes, you'll reinforce what you know, but won't see any growth.

For music-learning tasks it's hard to estimate what wrong 15% of the time means. I think the main takeaway is not to get hung up on "perfect practice." You need that little bit of failure baked into every learning task. Adjust the difficulty of whatever you're practicing to always be making a small number of mistakes.

You're not chasing perfection, you're chasing growth. It's funny, too, that "perfect" is a limit while growth is limitless.

The key to remember is: If you're not failing, you're not learning.

Catastrophic Failure

Lastly, I want to teach you about the glory of catastrophic failure. A lot of things in life have no room for error. Airplanes need to be safe. Bridges shouldn't collapse. Music is different. You can fail at epic proportions and no one gets hurt.

What I tell my students is every practice session briefly try the impossible. Make an outrageous attempt at something. Stretch...reach. Music isn't rock climbing. You aren't going to fall to your death.

Doing this can sometimes surprise you. You might find you did way better than you thought you could. The other times, it will show you where your weaknesses are. Throwing yourself into sticky situations is good preparation for real world situations, too.

I'm not saying play something inaccurately for hours on end. But be unreasonable for part of your practice. Go past the perfect, past the acceptable, past the almost. Hit catastrophic, fall-on-your-face disaster level and see what happens.

Be careful how you interpret what I'm saying. I am NOT suggesting to "push" and hurt yourself. Learning isn't supposed to be painful or exhausting no matter what the movies tell you.

What I'm suggesting is mentally not to stop yourself from trying the ridiculous. Try playing something way faster than you think you can. Try playing that totally unfamiliar chord progression or time signature. Try that harder exercise. Stand up like a baby and take a fall. Build some catastrophic failure into your practice routine.

Flirt with disaster when you practice.