Practice

Coauthored with Judah, who introduced me to the idea and taught me how to practice better.

practice (noun, ˈpraktɪs): repeated exercise in or performance of an activity or skill so as to acquire or maintain proficiency in it

The core mechanism of practice is simpler than we tend to appreciate. The brain trains pathways you traverse often. When you practice something repeatedly, it becomes easier to repeat what you practiced. Activities that used to require attention are promoted to effortless muscle memory. You will feel it happening if you play a guitar riff a thousand times: your fingers moving unbidden to the correct frets, the strings being plucked unconsciously.

Practice is brutally effective at doing what it’s asked to do

But practice doesn’t care if you’re practicing the correct thing. If you make a mistake while playing a guitar riff a thousand times, you just get very good at playing it wrong. It’s better to play as slowly as you need to get it right, and trust practice to do its thing. Neither does practice promise you forward progress; you get better only at the specific thing you’re repeating. At best, that thing is a foundation for the next step.

Practice changes you in ways that you have no model for

We are bad at estimating the quantity and quality of progress that can be made. If you’re new to playing an instrument, like I am, the chasm between having ten hours of practice and thirty hours of practice can feel absurd. Before you practice, you have no idea what your post-practice experience will be like. It is an unknowable thing that only rewiring your brain and body gives you access to. And each domain is unknowable in its own way, so this is not an area where you should trust your intuition (you have none!).

You can practice behaviours, not just skills

Even what therapists might call “maladaptive patterns.” Practice shows up nearly everywhere in life, in habits and patterns, in every virtue and every vice. Honesty is practised; so is defensiveness. If you feel yourself reaching for a lie or deflection, it’s because you’ve trained that muscle very well. If you are honest, it is because you have trained the muscle of straightforwardly addressing difficult truths. If you swallow your pride often, you can eventually do it without much effort.

Identity is downstream of practice

Think about how complex your awareness of identity is; the many narratives about yourself that are playing out in your head. In an effort to change, you reach for “insights”, new justifications, and better models of yourself. It’s convenient to believe that you can think your way out of your behaviours.

Sometimes this thinking is a useful precursor to practice, but more often it is merely futile. You emerge from your introspective stupor having understood yourself somewhat better, and having changed not at all.

In truth, things are less conceptually complex. Your model of yourself, your felt sense of who you are, the thing that feels irreducibly you, arises from what you practice. You didn’t arrive with an identity, fully-formed, and practice it into behaviour; the more likely chain of causation is that you practiced (because of accident, duress, or imitation) a set of behaviours that you now call your identity.

A productive treatment for maladaptive behaviour is just more reps at acting how you’d prefer. Here’s TLP suggesting this as a strategy to cure narcissism:

“I feel like I am playing a part, that I’m in a role. It doesn’t feel real.”

Instead of trying to stop playing a role– again, a move whose aim is your happiness– try playing a different role whose aim is someone else’s happiness. Why not play the part of the happy husband of three kids? Why not pretend to be devoted to your family to the exclusion of other things? Why not play the part of the man who isn’t tempted to sleep with the woman at the airport bar?

“But that’s dishonest, I’d be lying to myself.” Your kids will not know to ask: so?

TLP describes the thesis of his blog this way:

…nothing matters more than your will. […] Every choice you make influences your identity, and not the other way around; the sooner you accept this, the sooner you can become the person you want to be. You get to pick who you are. Go pick.

One has to practice, frequently, the act of treating people well.

What you end up practicing will often depend on your environment

The effectiveness of practice depends on whether you put in the reps. But whether you put in the reps is influenced by your environment. Writing more is easier when you have an audience. It is harder to write into a void, unless, of course, you have practice doing it. It is harder to practice telling the truth in an environment where dishonesty is rewarded.

You have to consider the practices that arise from your choices: what’s on your desk, whether your gym bag is packed, how far the guitar is from reach, the quality of the moral judgment of your friends, keeping in mind that you will unconsciously get thousands of reps of the behaviours they incentivise. If you find it difficult to change your environment, consider that you may not have enough practice at doing that, and begin. If you are unable to change your environment, you will have to be far more deliberate with your practice.

Thanks to Hiya and Raagini for reading drafts and offering comments on this post.