Key Takeaways
- Practicing is key to achieve better performance.
- Musicians, acrobats, sportsmen, etc., spend much of their time practicing, and little time performing. Software professionals should follow the example.
- The focus should be on continuously getting better, instead of trying to achieve perfection.
- Find yourself a time schedule where you can apply relevant techniques. Reflect on the process, on the discovering, and on the feedback you are getting. Do it again, over and over 😉
Have you ever wonder about what makes great professionals, well, great? Is it a matter of being "naturally gifted" or something else?
Imagine you are at a concert, watching your favorite band, and you are astonished by their mastery of the instruments (and their music, of course). How did they manage to achieve such ability and make such great music?
Now, if you extrapolate the same thinking process towards acrobats, sportsmen, doctors, sculptors, architects, etc., you will end up asking the same question. The answer may be in the difference between practicing and performing.
Practice makes better, not perfect
You may have heard of the 10,000 hour rule, popularized by Malcom Gladwell, in his book Outliers: "(...) it takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve mastery of complex skills and materials (...)". This statement has been debunked several times (see 10,000 Hours May Not Make a Master After All), because there are a lot of factors that influence the mastery process, not only practice. But, one thing seems to be reasonable to claim (see Over-Practicing Makes Perfect): continuous practice makes it better.
Perfection is quite subjective idea. So, that seems to be a good enough reason to strive to be better, instead of perfect, simply because there is a previous state to compare to. Since your current state of better may be perfect to someone else, constant practice leads to eventual perfection.
The art of performing
When you practice something, whatever it is, you do it for a reason. Maybe you want to be great at playing football, or guitar, or piano, or picking up an heavy weight, or typing really fast, or writing awesome and correct code, efficiently. In our daily job, we spend our time performing code (I am ignoring all the meetings 😂). Remember watching your favorite band? A band performs one to three hours, but practices so much more. Just think what would happen if they came on stage without previous practicing... Their performance would be a practice session, and maybe not exactly what you were expecting and paid for. Hence, seems reasonable to assert that high-performance is a result of consistent practice.
Better performers
How do we practice "correctly" to improve performance? Well, allow me to use an analogy of my own. I do CrossFit and it is an activity that has taught me a lot about this topic. Every week we do a benchmark Workout of the Day (WOD) to evaluate how we are performing. Given a WOD like "Grace", we do not start by doing the exercise immediately, because that would be dangerous and lead to severe lesions. We start with a lighter weight, practicing each small part of the movement to achieve a good technique – most of these are practiced daily – and, afterwards, link each of those parts together. With time, we are ready to start the WOD and measure the results. If you have done better than last time, you know that you are improving.
Thus, to better perform, we must practice and measure continuously, even if it means that the measurement is qualitative (e.g., do you feel you are a better problem solver than yesterday?). Find yourself a time schedule without interruptions, without stress, where you are dedicated to solving specific challenges and focusing on the techniques involved (e.g., design, refactoring, code reading, approval testing, etc.). The end goal is to reflect on the path taken, on the feedback you are getting, and the discovering you are making. When the time comes to perform, you will do it better than ever before 😎
Não percam o próximo post, porque eu também não
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