Sterling Terrell

recovering economist

Willing To Practice

Willing To Practice

What are you willing to practice at?

Because if it is true that to practice is to excel, then maybe what you should be doing with your life is as simple as answering this one little question.

See, I think the secret sauce to success is found somewhere during a decade of hard work.

Practice and time brings mastery. And mastery begets success.

At least that’s what I keep telling myself bleeding out my fingers on this blog. Every. Single. Day.

Because everything is practice, if you want to know the truth.

Enthusiasm is more important to mastery than innate ability, it turns out, because the single most important element in developing an expertise is your willingness to practice. Therefore, career experts argue, you’re better off pursuing a profession that comes easily and that you love, because that’s where you’ll be more eager to practice and thereby earn a competitive advantage.

-Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

Practice Makes Perfect, And Everything Else?

Practice Makes Perfect, And Everything Else?

The phrase practice makes perfect is cliche.

And at the same time, I believe, a million times more important than we first consider it.

Because practice does not just make perfect.

Practice is also how you happen to learn to do anything. It’s how you improve at anything.

This is a point that I repeat ad nauseam to my children:

“Prodigy is a myth. The only way to become special at something is to do it every day for many years.”

The secret to success is after all not exciting – it’s mostly repetition and work.

At my upright Mason & Hamlin piano in the den where my father spent the evenings hanging in traction, I practiced for hours every day. I ran through my scales and arpeggios, then turned to whatever piece of music I was working on: a Bach Invention, a Chopin nocturne, a Beethoven bagatelle, a Mozart sonata. I didn’t consider the meaning of the word practice. It would be many years before I began to understand that all of life is practice: writing, driving, hiking, brushing teeth, packing lunch boxes, making beds, cooking dinner, making love, walking dogs, even sleeping. We are always practicing. Only practicing.

-Dani Shapiro, Still Writing

Sterling Terrell