We’ve all heard the advice that “Practice makes perfect”. I was fortunate to have a violin teacher as a kid who told me that advice is just wrong, because he said that what actually happens is that “Practice makes permanent”.
Neuroscientists say that “neurons that fire together, wire together” – the more that you perform a set of actions, the easier that it becomes for the brain to do that pattern of actions. So my old violin teacher was right; practice doesn’t make perfect because if you are practicing the wrong thing, you are training your brain to make the incorrect patterns become automatic and unconscious i.e. you’ll do the wrong thing permanently.
So be thoughtful about your regular practices and habits; you are wiring those patterns into your unconscious brains, and moving them towards becoming permanent behaviors. This sort of deliberate practice is how you move from conscious competence into unconscious competence.
What practices of yours do you want to become permanent? Are you performing them regularly at the skill level that you desire so that they can become more unconscious?
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