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Is structured practice overrated? It depends.
When I was 17 years old, I attended "band camp", and came away with the disquieting conclusion that I wasn't practicing enough. Surrounded by people who had spent their lives practicing 3, 4, 5 hours-a-day, I felt like I'd barely scratched the surface.
I knew I had to catch up.
The easiest lever to pull was "quantity". I started with a blank slate of 3 hours-a-day (minimum), and found things to fill it with.
I maintained that through the last years of high-school, into college, into grad school, and for many years after graduation.
I think two things are true of long, structured practice routines: first, everybody who wants to be a "black belt" needs to put in those hours at some point in her career.
(I'm *not* saying I'm a black belt, by the way.)
Second, you can't *not* get better when you're putting those kinds of hours. It's a brute-force approach. What's more, learning to practice efficiently is a skill in its own right, and probably requires that you spend years practicing *inefficiently*.
But what happens when we take a look under the hood?
As you might suspect from the name of my channel, you likely discover that not everything you've been practicing has equal value. A small number of things, 20% or less, is probably responsible for 80% or more of the results.
So - first conclusion: if you stay with the 20%, you can spend less time, and rely on less *structure*, and still get better faster: hence the "mess around".
In the interview I play at the beginning of the video, Nate Wood told me he mostly improvises in the practice room.
But what are those 20%? How do you know you're not just continuing to mostly waste time, but just getting fewer potent hours?
That's certainly the fear. "I'm doing a whole hodgepodge of stuff, and I don't know what's working and what's not, so I'm gonna keep it all."
Tantamount to "we know we're wasting half our advertising dollars. We just don't know which half."
But you can have reasonable hypotheses. In today's video, I put forward 4. The "4 Cs". These are core skills that, as long as you're working on *one* of them, make it almost impossible to waste time.
Can you see the complexity of the narrative thread I'm trying to weave here? (Not that I'm saying I'm succeeding:P) That's why this video is 20 minutes. And we haven't even gotten to feedback loops.
Ok, so why does 80/20 "messing around" work. One good hypothesis is feedback loops. If you want a pure illustration of feedback loops in action, just loop a bar of John Coltrane (a slow solo), and try to whistle it. The first few reps will be atrocious. If you repeat it enough, it will get better, little-by-little, without your conscious brain needing to do anything.
That's a pure feedback loop. So we want to spend as much of our practice session as possible engaged in feedback loops toward goals we want to achieve. Simple, right?
And that's why Stick Control and the 26 Essential Rudiments work so well. They're tailor-made for those feedback loops.
But they have to adapt as your needs change. Which is why: The 4 Cs.
Hope you enjoy.
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