We all know that phrase, "Practice makes perfect." We heard it ad nauseam as we were growing up—in sports, in piano lessons, from parents, from teachers, sometimes from annoying older siblings. You probably say it to yourself now. For years, I did, too.
Have you ever stopped to ask yourself if it's true?
Ask yourself, does practice lead to perfection? Does rote repetition guarantee mastery? Well, yes and no. Because what if your method of practice is wrong?
A few years ago, I read Daniel Coyle’s book, The Talent Code, which sets out to answer the question, “Is greatness born or is it grown?” The author asks this question about “practice makes perfect,” and part of his answer involves the concept of “Deep Practice.” He defines deep practice as struggling in targeted ways, "operating at the edges of your ability, [because] where you make mistakes — makes you smarter.”
Essentially, he says, doing something perfectly isn’t where we grow. It’s in doing hard things, making mistakes, and actually failing that makes us smarter.
How?? The answer is in our brains. Myelin is a neural substance that wraps around and insulates the fibers of our nerve cells, improving the speed and accuracy with which neurons fire and translate information from the brain to other parts of our bodies. Unlike other genetically fixed components of our biological makeup, the amount of myelin in our brains is not set when we reach adulthood. It continues to grow as we stretch ourselves!
We grow measurably and definitively smarter by struggling, stumbling, trying, and pushing ourselves beyond our comfort zones.
Coyle describes the process of growing myelin like watching a baby try to take her first steps. Wobbly, staggering, and inevitably falling... but getting up and trying again the next time. Babies don't practice with a walker until they are confident they can walk perfectly without it. They just... try! And then they fall, of course. But every wobbly, staggering step causes myelin to loop around and insulate nerve cells, so the next time she tries to take a step, her brain says, "Ah yes, we've done this before. Let's see if we can do it better than we did last time."
The most interesting thing about the process of deep practice (aka, growing myelin) is how practice in one area increases capacity in other areas. Deciding to learn a new language in your 30s or 40s can open up creative pathways in your brain that will benefit your current skill sets. It's the same idea that athletes and trainers use when building muscle— "muscle confusion" is doing the same exercise in a different way, or with new repetitions, or at a different tempo, to keep the body guessing and forcing the muscles to get stronger, even the muscles you aren't working with that exercise. It's less about the specific muscle group, and more about building myelin in the brain that tells the muscles to get stronger!
What does this mean for us as business owners? Don't shy away from hard things! Try new things, both in your work sphere, and outside of it. Your next burst of creativity and innovation may come as a direct result of myelin in your brain that you built during a pottery class, a long run in new shoes, solo travel in a foreign country, lifting heavy weights at the gym, or learning a new dance step.
The best part of all of this is what it means for us when we stumble and fall. Failure is never the end. In fact, it might just be the beginning of greatness.