Some more thoughts on the practice of practice. Abundance vibes today.
The name of the game is “desirable difficulty.” This is like a zone of optimal learning, where your learning is maximized, and this leads to improved performance of the actual thing. I have used music as an example because that is the primary practice I was engaged in while I was first learning these theoretical concepts in class, which I then began to apply to literally my entire fucking life, but these concepts can be applied to any learning endeavor, be it artistic, logical, physical, mental, literally anything that involves learning. It should come as no surprise that I like to get down into the rabbit holes, and this one is perhaps the most rewarding and to me personally one of the most interesting and insightful.
I like to think in “blocks” with my practice routines. The whole routine is comprised of blocks, and each block has its own subordinate elements, which are the individual tasks or activities that you actually do, whereas the blocks are ways of organizing the activities. All of these things can be varied, both within and between each other. Variance in the routine is good for learning, but it also creates freshness for you and keeps you on your toes.
Each individual activity should in some way be completed in every practice session, generally speaking. If it takes longer than that, then it should probably be considered as a long-term project which you do for reasons other than pure learning. I’d bet you can isolate some element or aspect of that long-term project so you can complete it within a practice session.
Whatever you are learning, you want to isolate each of the individual elements that go into doing the actual thing. If you are learning an instrument, for example, there is the music that you play with the instrument, and there is also the physicality of playing the instrument itself. If you are learning a game that does not involve physicality, there are likely broad strategic concepts as well as honed-in tactical concepts that apply at different levels. Strategy dictates what tactics end up being deployed. If you aren’t storming the beaches, then you don’t need the marines. If you aren’t entering a new business sector, then you don’t need to revamp your marketing.
Some of this may not be all that new to you, so here’s where I’ll try and provide some value. There are thresholds in any skill where your sub-skills need to be at a certain level for you to advance. For me, I can imagine jazzy piano stuff in my mind, but I cannot reliably reproduce those sounds on a piano because I do not possess the technical piano skills to play those notes, nor do I possess the musicality skills to quickly and accurately identify the notes I am hearing in my mind, either relatively (like Do-Re-Mi) or absolutely (like that was middle C-D-E). I would need to level-up both of these skills to pass that threshold and reach that broader, more comprehensive new level of skill and ability.
If you can very easily do the practice activity, then you either need to increase its difficulty somehow or move on to a new practice that is more suitable for your skill. If the practice is too difficult, then you will spend too much time attempting to correct mistakes or trying to wrap your mind around a concept that is overly complex for your current understanding. Each extra bit of complexity requires more “processing power” from you if you have not yet well-learned the material, and you only have so much processing power to work with.
The difference between humans and machines, though, is that as you learn something, less processing power becomes required. It is not that you expand your processing power, but that you make things easier to process. The less processing power is needed, the more you can make connections between concepts and increase complexity while staying in the zone of optimized learning.
It may seem like a good idea to do a larger, more detailed and fleshed-out project as your means of learning, but if you break that project down into each of the individual things that you actually do, you can actually speed up your learning and before too long crank out that “long-term project” quickly and easily because you have applied the following learning concepts to each of the individual components.
When it comes to routines, the three important concepts are retrieval practice (or basically just “practice”), spaced practice (so practice activities occurring across time rather than clumped together), and interleaving.
If you sit down and grind, grind, grind one really difficult activity for hours in one session, you may eventually get it down in that session. But then try and do it a week from now and note your performance. Alternatively, spend a bit of time every day for a week and then test yourself and note your performance.
Learning naturally tends towards decay if it is not maintained. Every time you practice (or retrieve the stuff from your memory), you diminish decay and add on durability while refining yourself. This is why spaced practice is so important, and why I would advocate 1 hour a day for 4 days instead of 4 hours for 1 day.
The reason interleaving is so effective is because it deliberately introduces decay into the learning. Wait, what? Aren’t we trying to stop the decay? Yes, and no. Some decay is good. It can erode bad habits you may have first missed and stop them from solidifying, and it also can make the memory even more durable and strong, like a multi-layered foundation instead of a single block. This is not a great excuse to not practice, but I would certainly not discourage you from experimentation and seeing what happens if you find this interesting.
Interleaving is also effective because it naturally encourages you to build all of the sub-skills you want to learn instead of focusing too much on any one thing and then becoming imbalanced, as no things should be. It’s like the guy who only does arm day. Looks good for a second, but then a slight breeze rolls by and knocks him over. It is also the case that if you only stay with one project, you will mostly be working with material that you have already created instead of creating new stuff from scratch, which is what really gets your brain muscles going. It’s ok for a mini-learning-project or individual activity to be kind of derpy when you complete it, and really that can be exactly what you want because it allows you to analyze the derpiness and then move forward and practice again. It also naturally helps you let go of the need for artistic perfection. If you really like that idea, you can absolutely keep it around and have it in your back-pocket for when you come to do the Ultra Dope Awesome Masterpiece. Or the second Ultra Dope Awesome Masterpiece, or the third, etc. Gosh darn I have so many Ultra Dope Awesome Masterpieces.
This is a bit scattered of a post, and similar ideas are scattered throughout this thread, but if you take the time to learn and apply these concepts, they will reward you. It may sometimes seem like you are just spinning your wheels or doing abstract exercises that are separate from the art that you want to create (or the game you want to play, etc), but if you optimize your learning, then you will set yourself up to do anything you want with your skill and I suppose your life. You will not be stuck in a particular genre or way of doing something, or reach a ceiling that holds you back. I have my preferences for my actual artwork that I want to create and put out into the world (as art that does not go out into the world becomes stagnant, inbred, and irrelevant with time), but when it comes to pure learning, I believe it is best to enable yourself to succeed regardless of what exact specifics you end up doing because you have cultivated the fundamental skills that the art arises from, rather than the surface-level manifestations of the art.