I like to collect ideas. Often I write down a bunch of ideas about something I intend to write up as a blog post, or as part of the book I’m slowly writing. But one of my flaws is that I spend far too long collecting data, forming piles of assorted ideas, which I fail to turn into something more cohesive. To remedy this, I intend to post a bunch of related snippets every now and then as a flow of ideas in fairly raw form, without worrying about tying them together into a cohesive narrative.
So these Snippets will become my system for getting more value from my proclivity for collecting too many random ideas.
I’m going to start with some ideas around practice, training, or whatever you wish to call it. The intentional repetition of skill, or routine to move in the direction of our aspirations.
Practice your practice:
George Leonard, author of ‘Mastery’, talks a lot about the importance of practice, and the resolve to ensure you keep your practice up even when it seems to be going nowhere. He refers to ‘Staying on the Mat’, ensuring you have covered the things you want to work on. “The master of any game is generally a master of practice”, to be able to do this you need a sense of awe in the practice itself, doing it for its own sake, not just for the outcomes. “Mastery is practice” as Leonard asserts, it is the key to enduring the plateaus and staying on the path of mastery.
Practice is ordinary:
Get used to countless repetitions without climactic reward. It may be ordinary and mundane, but we can make it ritualistic, imbued with the special meaning we bring to it, meaning that we derive from sensing we are on the path of mastery.
George Leonard suggests that practice involves “a certain steadfastness, an ability to take pleasure in the endless repetition of ordinary acts“.
Practice is sacred:
Imagine yourself in the dojo, practising your katas with a sense of reverence for the generations who have practised in this way in the past. Elevate your practice to the sacrosanct, with all other distractions abated as you’re in touch with the divine. Be mindful or aware as you practice with intent.
Practice with intent:
Know what you’ll be working on and why, recall what you worked on yesterday, and plan what you’ll be working on in tomorrow’s practice session. Should anyone ask you’ll be able to tell them what you are working on today.
Break it down, slow it down:
Tackle your practice in small chunks, and vary the tempo. A useful practice technique musicians employ for learning scales, rhythm patterns or passages of music is to play to a metronome. Beginning at a speed where the piece can be comfortably performed without error and gradually increasing the speed over time. Each time the performance becomes comfortable, turn up the BPM (Beats Per Minute). The same can be applied to non-musical activities.
Spaced Repetition:
Spaced repetition is an evidence-based approach to optimising learning, showing that recal improves when learning sessions are spaced out during a period of time. Space your practice out with regularity during the days and weeks rather than cramming it all into one long session.
Put your ass where your heart wants to be:
Or your ‘arse’ as we would say in England. Steven Pressfield, author of “The War of Art” nails it with the title of his follow-up book. Practice is consistently putting your ass in the right place. Set up your environment and set boundaries so that your ass is less likely to resist.
Practice is controlled failure:
Practice often involves stretching yourself beyond your current limits, with the expectation of failing. One’s aim during practice is to seek data points, make adjustments, and see what happens.
In the Inner Game of Tennis, Timothy Galway talks about seeing failure during practice as data, and the need to see the data from the perspective of the neutral observer, without emotional attachment. When your serve goes into the net, it is just data.
Walking is one controlled fall after another.
Faith in the practice:
Faith involves trusting in the practice itself, surrendering to the practice, even when you can’t be sure of the eventual outcome. Not a naive trust but a courageous trust, faith with conviction. It is dutifully following the process, and loyalty to the practice, even without evidence that it will get you where you want to be.
It is common to see prescriptive success advice “Do these 10 things and you will get this”. In mastery, there are no quick fixes, no 10 easy steps, the path of mastery is a path of faith - trusting in the process and trusting in yourself to steadfastly commit to the practice, without a definite outcome.
Practice is evolutionary:
Aligned with Darwin’s theory of evolution, our practice sessions generate random mutations. We may be practising the drums and accidentally drop our drumstick at the ‘wrong’ moment which adds in some great sounding syncopation we weren’t expecting. Immediately struck by this we will try to repeat it intentionally - and suddenly we’ve developed a whole new groove.
Watch for mutations, lucky accidents, Bernard Purdie, regarded as the world’s most recorded drummer, discovering the ‘air’ in his hi-hat is a beautiful example of lucky accidents that can only come through persistent practice. We never know when the next insight will come which will give you a spurt in your progress. This is faith in the practice.
Own your practice:
Be accountable, take responsibility, and create boundaries. This is ownership. You define your practice and it’s your responsibility to ensure you keep your commitments to practice. The great thing about owning something is it gives you pride, you have a right to practice because it is yours. You created it, you own it.
Practice with the beginner’s mind:
“If you are not willing to be a fool, you can't become a master”, as Clinical Psychologist and worldwide phenomenon Jordan B. Peterson advises. Foolery precedes mastery, you need to be willing to make a fool of yourself, with the Beginner’s Mind in order to learn, in order to gain momentum on the path of mastery. Be open, be empty, let go, and stumble forward.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki
Just sit, just zazen, just practice
Shunryu Suzuki, a founding father of Zen in the West, emphasised practice over understanding. Zazen, the primary cross-legged sitting posture in Zen Buddhism, is frequently referenced in ‘Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind’. Instead of sitting in zazen with the goal of gaining enlightenment, Suzuki’s instructions are to ‘just sit’, the simple act of sitting in zazen is enlightenment itself.
We get too wrapped up in where we want to be, instead of where we are. “Be here now”, as Ram Dass said.
Focus on the practice today to avoid imposter syndrome:
Deal with Impostor syndrome by lowering your aspirations, improving current reality (practising), or giving fewer f*cks.
Alternatively, just make today's practice session your total aspiration instead of thinking too far into the future.
Systems over goals:
Your practice is your system, prioritise your thinking around following the system, not the big goal. A system is a set of principles or a model you apply to your practice. As Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, says in ‘How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big’: "If you do something every day, its a system. If you're waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it's a goal”.
Disciplined practice can be liberating:
Self-discipline sounds constraining. No one likes being told what to do. No, scrub that assumption, actually many people like being told what to do because they don’t think for themselves, they subjugate their thinking through acquiescence to supposed authorities - government, and the media for example. As Erich Fromm explored in ‘Escape from Freedom’, for some people, freedom can be a responsibility or a burden they wish to escape from. Some people don’t want to be free. Ooh, I’m being such a judgemental cynic! What I mean is that I don’t like being told what to do and I wish other people were the same - but one can only accept people as they are. If you can handle the responsibility of liberty, then developing the self-discipline to practice is what will give you freedom, flexibility and options in your chosen domain.
Noodling is not practice
I sometimes sit with my guitar, absent-mindedly noodling - playing things I’m already familiar with whilst my mind is distracted - perhaps while watching something on YouTube or TV. This is not practice as there is no intent, no stretching myself, and no attention to what I’m doing.
Practice builds momentum, momentum is king:
Overcome inertia by relying on the flywheel effect, a concept described by Jim Collins in the book ‘Good to Great’1. it takes a while to get the flywheel moving, once it gains momentum it is easy to keep it going. Cut a groove with daily practice, and the groove will get deeper and deeper until it is just easy and natural to continue along the groove - you have momentum, and momentum begets more momentum.
Practice involves negotiation:
George Leonard in his book ‘Mastery’ refers to the importance of negotiation - navigating the path of mastery involves continual negotiation between the devil and angels upon your shoulders. We often experience resistance to practice, which will require us to negotiate with ourselves to understand and overcome our resistance. Negotiation is about balancing the trade-offs between competing needs, and often the needs are deep, so you need to work on yourself, to know-thyself and be willing to confront some uncomfortable truths.
We often limit the idea of negotiation to the warring conflicts of two separate parties. It’s a rare insight to see one’s inner conflicts as separate warring parties. The inner negotiation is just as difficult as outer negotiations.
Repetition is the mother of skill:
The idea that ‘repetition is the mother of skill’ seems to be associated with Tony Robbins2. He is alluding to the words of Psychologist Donald Hebb, ‘neurons that wire together fire together’. The neurological phenomenon where repeated actions become a hardwired skill through a connected chain of neurons associated with the action. With repetition of practice, these chains are wrapped in ever thicker myelin, an insulating protective sheath composed primarily of lipids (fatty compounds), to make the circuit more performant.
Lessons on myelination paraphrased from Daniel Coyle’s book ‘The Talent Code’:
Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal travelling through a chain of neurons - a circuit of nerve fibres.
Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibres and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy
The more we fire a particular circuit, the more the myelin optimises that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our movements and thoughts become
Practice does not make perfect:
Because perfection doesn’t exist, at least in terms of mastery, as mastery is a never-ending pursuit. Don’t try to be perfect as a result of practice, instead try to perfect your practice.
Do the right thing wrong:
As organisational theorist, Russell L. Ackoff, said "It is far better to do the right thing wrong than to do the wrong thing right.". We get better through practice, but we can get very good at the wrong thing, and ingrained bad habits are uncomfortable to unlearn. Doing the right thing wrong signifies that you are on the right path, the wise path, the path of mastery. Doing the wrong thing right means you are not even on the path of mastery.
Practice and learning are not the same things:
It's worth noting that while learning and practice are often interdependent, they are not the same thing. Effective learning often involves practice, as it allows a person to apply what they have learned and reinforce their understanding. Likewise, effective practice often follows an initial learning phase, as a person needs first to learn the principles and concepts behind what they are practicing to improve their performance.
Learning is cutting the first groove. Practice is deepening the groove.
Practice is continuing to show up:
Just showing up, even when you don’t feel like it, or don’t feel your’re getting anywhere, is essential to mastery. A habitual commitment to consistency means you avoid having to persuade yourself to show up, it’s just something you repeadedly do.
Liz Fosslien, illustrator of human emotions captures the idea of consistently showing up in this image:
Always remember the words of Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping: ”I get knocked down, but I get up again. You're never gonna keep me down…”
Concluding thoughts:
All of the above snippets could be filed under the ‘notes to self’ category. I make no claims to mastery and every claim to the ordinary. But I am striving to find the path to mastery in many of my endeavours. “The master is one who stays on the path day after day, year after year”, as George Leonard writes on Mastery.
I’ve been very good at sustaining certain practices over a multi-decade timeframe. Since the age of 17, I’ve barely skipped a day of physical training in various forms - around 35 years to date. For the past 3 years, I’ve stuck steadfastly to a plan of extended fasting (black coffee and water with a little beef bone broth for 5 - 7 days) on each equinox and solstice. I know with certainty that barring any unexpected events I will do some kind of physical workout tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after. Through life’s natural ups and downs, I’ve found my physical health and fitness practices have been a reassuring consistency, a solid practice that has kept me sane.
I may feel like I am on some sort of path of mastery in the realm of physical health, but in some other areas of practice, I tend to be a little more flakey. My music practice goes in fits and starts, as does my practice of regular writing. In work and personal study, I’ve been something of a dabbler or a hacker rather than following a path of mastery - finding such a wide variety of things that interest me that I often lose focus.
Hence these imperfect writings in an imperfect world - one of my aims with this blog and the idea of ‘Ordinary Mastery’ is to hold up a mirror to my own practices so that I can be more intentional and make the best use of my time in this story of life that passes in the wink of an eye.
Epilogue:
Mmm…. Having just re-read and re-evaluated the insights here I’m feeling like I’m missing something important. I’m missing the CHAOS of ordinary people’s lives. I’m talking about practice from the perspective of someone whose life is, relatively speaking, fairly well-ordered. I have a steady home life and a family that understands my need for a bit of downtime every day to focus on my own stuff. I realise that many people’s lives can be quite turbulent and I may be underestimating the volatility of many people’s daily lives. I think I’ve achieved my aim to brain-dump as much as possible on approaches to practice here, but need to watch out that I don’t get too smug and full of myself that I miss the ‘Ordinary’ in Ordinary Mastery.
I’ve not read Jim Collins’ book ‘Good to Great’, so this is not an endorsement, but I do like the concept.
I’m a little dubious of Tony Robbins and others of the ‘Success Guru’ genre who lure ordinary people to pay high prices for conferences and courses with the promise that they too can become ‘millionaires’ if only they follow the guru’s advice.
of calls their ilk 'Contrapreneurs' who follow psychologically manipulative techniques to get people inspired and fired up to part with their cash on cultish/scammy courses.