Take that (not) Einstein!
No. Practice isn’t doing the same thing over and over again.
Practice is an iterative process where each time you fail, you learn something new and add it to the process until eventually you find a result that is different.
You’re practicing your golf swing because you keep shanking the ball to the right. You don’t keep making the same shot over and over agin. You adjust your stance. You adjust your leg positioning. You adjust a hundred little things until you find the combination that gives you the results you want. THAT’S Practice…not just repeating the same action.
When I get a movement right, I keep repeating it over and over until it’s committed to memory. You’re saying I could’ve stopped at the first success? Why did no one tell me earlier?
Nah. Some forms of practice like shooting or bowling or anything where the goal is to do something 10 or 100 times and get a high score are absolutely about doing exactly the same thing over and over again as predictably as possible and the variance of result is the problem.
If you don’t like that example, how about chess puzzles?
Certainly between practice sessions you might wisely expose yourself to new ideas, but the idea is the same:
See a position, see the winning strategy / tactic / idea. If you’re a student of the woodpecker method, once you do that once, you do it again, exactly the same way, and hope to be faster at it.
These are forms of practice wherein you do the same thing, exactly the same way, and hope to get increasingly better results by honing a skill through repetition without changing anything. its not that you CANT change things sometimes or that you shouldn’t, but generally speaking the idea is consistency.
Ehh, I get what you’re saying but…that’s iteration, improvement, development
Practice is rehearsing the same move over and over, the phrase “practice like you play” exists for that reason. It is by definition, repetition.
Same is not identical.
“I am going to get a drink.” - “I’m gonna do the same.”
Will the second person now do identical movements to the first one? Will the second person use identical words to order an identical drink?
Or will both of them walk up to the bar and each of them will get some drink they like?
“I’m going to practice golf this weekend.” - “Yeah, I’m going to do the same.”
Will the second person immitate every movement of the first one? Or are both of them just going to practice golf, one of them maybe on a golf course and the other one on a drive range?
If you’re practicing the exact same way over and over you’re doing something wrong.
You must not be a bowler.
That’s not always true. Finding the optimal way to do something is only one potential aspect of practice. Another is getting to a level where you can do it consistently and on demand, over and over and over, without missing a beat.
And even once you’ve reached that level, that skill can be lost or degrade over time if you dont keep at it, so repeatedly performing the same motions in the exact same way becomes pretty much necessary in order to maintain your skill level.
Finding? How are you going to find it? Since you’re arguing to never change what you’re doing in practice the very first attempt at practice must be the thing you always repeat right?
Why are you pretending I said things I didn’t say? Finding the optimal way of doing something involves getting it wrong before you get it right. We all know this. What I was talking about was not greenhorn entry-level practice, but the practice of an expert who has already figured that much out. Obviously, you have to learn the right way to do something before you can do it the right way.
Ask literally any half-decent guitarist if trying to do the same exact thing in the same exact way helps or hurts their skill. Now ask a martial artist. A dancer. A singer. A painter. An engineer. A carpenter. Even a bowler, as someone else already mentioned. These are all skills that are honed through repitition.
In the spirit of the dialogue, I am going to repeat myself because it seems like I might need to; none of them got it right the first time. But after they did get it right, I guarantee you, their practice became about doing it again in exactly the same way. And then, once they were happy with their newly refinded skill, they learn something else and start that cycle again.
What’s that Bruce Lee quote? “I do not fear the man that has practiced a thousand moves once. I fear the man that has practiced one move a thousand times”. Skill comes with understanding and understanding comes with focus. At first, you focus on placing your fingers on exactly the right frets at exactly the right time, and then, after you’ve figure that out and can do it correctly, you focus on doing it over and over again until you’re sure that can always do it exactly the way you want to, whenever you want it done. This isn’t esoteric lore. It’s common sense.
Finding the optimal way of doing something involves getting it wrong before you get it right. We all know this. What I was talking about was not greenhorn entry-level practice, but the practice of an expert who has already figured that much out. Obviously, you have to learn the right way to do something before you can do it the right way.
Congratulations that was the point.
If that’s the point, then I had it right the first time, and only seemed to lose you when I followed the idea to its obvious next leg. After you figure out how to do it right, then the rest of that initial comment comes into play.
You not following along well enough until it’s been reiterated and fed to you as directly and simply as possible is not the dunk you seem to think it is.
Oh look you lost the point again.
You said that practicing something the same way over and over is wrong, fullstop. I said that’s not always true because after a certain point, that is the exact kind of practice that keeps the skill ready. I miss, lose, and never find many points, but I see this one clear as day. Your absolute statement was not absolutely true, and it’s really just not that big of a deal.
While I don’t appreciate that you misconstrued what I said earlier, wilfully or otherwise, I also don’t think that’s a rightful excuse for me to get as rude with you as I chose to. So, take it or leave it, I offer my apologies for that.
Idk about that…
When you practice something, you’re actively changing your technique to elicit better results. You’re not making huge changes, but rather a series of miniscule ones that add up.
For instance, I could sit down with a flute and a piece of music, and play it decently. It wouldn’t be great, but it wouldn’t be terrible. If I play it the same way every time, it’s always going to sound decent - but it’s always going to have the same wrong notes, the same rushed passages, the same intonation issues… If I practice it, I can make changes over time that fix those things. I can fix my fingerings, even out the rushed bits, adjust my intonation… But then I wouldn’t be doing the same thing anymore, I’d be doing something slightly different.
You are doing the same thing (playing the same piece of music on the same flute). You aren’t doing an identical thing.
Did Einstein actually say that? Even if he did, he wasn’t a psychologist. Plus, scientists recreate experiments all the time, literally doing as close to the same thing as possible and often getting different results.
So No. I also was always very irritated by this quote, because from a scientific point of view this is rather incorrect, as (like you said) experiments need to be repeated, to verify the results.
No, Einstein did not say that. But it’s often misattributed to him, that’s why I put it as “(not) Einstein”.
Gotcha, thanks!
A idiotic comments trying to argue that its different, dont understand that the AIM stays the same. And yes after each iteration you get closer with practice.
The execution might look a bit different but the aim is still at the exact same after each iteration.
Thanks!
I’d argue it’s all but impossible to do the exact same execution every single time, even if you aren’t practising.
I feel like some people (and on the internet maybe even most people) need to disagree to everything that is said. I had that so often that I agree with someone, and offer another point arguing in the same direction, only for the other person to misunderstand my support of their point as an attack and starting to argue against my supporting point.
I hate contrarians.
“If at first you don’t succeed, give up and blame the Jews”
watch that get downvoted
YOULL GET AN UP VOTE ABD LIKE IT!!!
We have (at least) two fundamentally different types of knowledge—there’s our intuitive world model that does improve with repetition learning (much like a neural network) and does change with practice; and there’s rule-based knowledge that improves by eliminating possible rules/theories via observation.
My interpretation of Einstein’s quip is that insanity consists in confusing the two—thinking that rule-based knowledge can improve by performing the same tests over and over until the results match our theories, instead of modifying our theories to reflect the results.
It’s not an Einstein quote. It’s a common misattribution to make a stupid quote sound smart.
What? No it’s not when you practice you expect to get better… The results vary greatly.
Also one would practice a variety of things that are completely different from each other not the same thing over and over.
Also Albert Einstein never said that the first recorded use of the phrases is in the 1980s.
Difference of practice vs insanity is directly related to something within your control vs outside of your control.
This was one guys opinion and everyone took it to heart. For example, If we listened to and did everything Neil degrass Tyson said then we’d all be closed minded condescending assholes
And we don’t even know who that one guy was apart from that it wasn’t Einstein.