Practice makes satisfaction

“Practicing invites a kind of intimacy, a moment of mindfulness that we can cut and paste into our daily routines. Once we appreciate that practice is not an endgame, our ego disappears, and we enter the experience with complete commitment.”

– Xenia Hanusiak 

“Feel free to stop striving: learn to relish being an amateur”Psyche Ideas

Every week I practice a new soccer skill. My most recent skill is called around the world.
Check it out ;-)

Many people would see this as a habit. Habits as a topic have taken off in the last few years; everywhere you look, there’s a new book about making better habits for health, wealth, eating, and writing... The list is endless, and yet I would say working on soccer skills each week is not a habit but a practice—an intentional practice of skill-building. 

This distinction may seem subtle, but let me explain. Here’s a typical series of events that starts with an intentional practice and ends up with a habit. 

Step 1: Start with an intention. Let’s say you want to get fit. You begin to practice by going for a run. 

Step 2: You decide you will go for a run every other day. 
Step 3: You become used to it, and it becomes a habit of running. Now, no matter what, you are going to go for a run. 

I would say stop at step 1.

Once running becomes a habit, it can become less about intention; you can lose track of why you were doing it in the first place, much like a video gamer loses track of time so he can have one more boss battle or a wine drinker forgets precisely what that great taste was in their mouth from the first glass.

The habit of running is no longer a practice; practice is based on improvement, regular challenges, trying something you can't do, and not repeating something you can.

An example of intention-based practice turning to habit is artist Johnathan Harris’s project “One photo a day.” His initial intent was to be more present to capture the moment by taking a picture daily and posting it to his website. But over time, the intent was lost; the practice turned into a habit. He found he was taking pictures every day and wondering not about the feeling he was trying to capture but what subscribers to his website would think about the image. An almost compulsive need to take the kind of pictures that would get a reaction from the audience, he was habitual in making photos he knew could please an audience rather than challenging himself to create images that intentionally captured his thoughts. He was on autopilot. 

So if that’s not it, what is a practice?
Popular wisdom says that if you get into a habit of doing something, you will improve over time and gain mastery. Ten thousand hours of practice, and you can master any skill. Yet if this were true, all those who run for fun would be elite athletes after 15 years of running, and all the bloggers would be excellent writers. What’s missing from the conversation is that each of those magical 10,000 hours must be highly focused deliberate practice hours where you focus on improving a specific weakness or trying something beyond the repetition.

An example of intentional practice in my own life was teaching my son how to play football (soccer). In “Setting challenges, not goals”, I reflected on how we worked on intentional practice this way: “By making a target that was challenging, all his other skills were improving. He was improving overall even if he was only hitting the “top bins” targets once in every ten attempts. On the other attempts, he almost always found the rest of the goal. Creating this artificial constraint allowed a range of other skills to improve. The actual goal of the exercise became almost irrelevant, he would shoot 100, 120, and 150 shots every session. He could sense the improvement, so not hitting our artificially created targets was not a disappointment but a challenge.”

This intentional practice led to him getting much better at football. He could have just carried on kicking the ball into an open net or getting to take three shots in a 30-minute game on a team. Instead, he intentionally focused on hitting top bins (the upper 90s), which seemed challenging, but was very satisfying once attained. But it is still a challenge and always will be. He knows he will lose this ability if he stops intentionally practicing this skill. 

A practice is not a singular act; it requires help and challenges. While turning up is a good start, getting better at something is the thing that keeps you going. You often need other people to help you and challenge you to improve, to realize that practices are not about making progress in your life toward an end goal; as Adam Curtis, one of my favorite authors and filmmakers, said, “One of the most radical things you could do today is make something amazing and not tell anyone else about it.”

A practice is not about the endpoint; it’s about being in the moment and enjoying kicking a ball, writing a sentence, or even the act of making a mark on a blank piece of paper.