Performance without Practice

Picture this.? You’re ten years old, standing on a baseball field beaming with pride because you are the starting pitcher for your jr. little league game.? You have seven players behind you, and 30 fans in front to cheering you on.? In your mind, the job could not be easier.? Throw a ball 46 feet to a target roughly the size of a pizza box.? Depending on the opposing team, you should only need to throw 18 pitches before your job is done and your team is at bat.? You get a little nervous when the umpire yells, “batter up”, because you don’t want to hit the other player, but you know exactly where you want to throw the ball so you shake off the butterflies and stand at the ready on the pitchers mound.

For the next 25 minutes you proceed to fall apart, emotionally first, and then physically.? Your pitches are going anywhere but the target.? By your 18th pitch, you have walked three batters, two of whom have already scored, and you still haven’t recorded a single out.? What started as the feeling of frog in your throat has turned into a raging stream of tears. Each encouraging phrase from your teammates, like “You got this, just throw the ball to the catches glove”, makes you want to scream, “DON’T YOU THINK I KNOW THAT”.? By pitch 25, your coach is on the mound, telling you to calm down, just have fun, and providing a tissue to help with the tears. Then you walk another two batters, hit a third, throw your glove in disgust, and walk off the field.? As you leave the field, drained of all dignity, you repeatedly tell yourself how much you suck, swearing that you will never pitch again.? You had one job to do, throw a ball 46 feet to a target roughly the size of a pizza box.? You are furious and wonder why you couldn’t perform the simple task you’ve watched others do hundreds of times?

I've experienced what I've just described a few times this spring as as an assistant jr. little league.? The experience itself is significantly more potent than for which my writing does not do justice. Sadly, I know exactly what the problem is.? We average three hours of game time, for every one hour of practice.? This ratio is not unique to baseball, but across all sports these days.? In my childhood, the ratio was, three hours of practice for every 1 hour of game time.? By the time our first game came around, we had practiced the fundamentals that muscle memory controlled most of what we did. Now this is not an article about how much smarter we used to be, or how spoiled our children are today. I’m from being an authority or even learned on how to coach youth sports. I do however know that overcoming a failed performance after adequate practice, is far easier than when practice was inadequate or worse did not occur. More over, at a time when it seems like we are always performing, the implications of performance without practice stretch far beyond youth sports.

We live in a golden age of instant response.? No longer do we wait one hour for the photo to be developed, or the newspaper the next morning to look up the closing price of our favorite stock.? Forgot whether an artery transports blood to or away from the heart, just ask Siri.? Who needs to wait for a plumber to fix the leaking kitchen sink, YouTube and Fiberfix (Shark Tank) will have your cabinet dry in no time.? The world has always been a stage, and thanks to technology, the bar to assuming a role on the stage is lower than ever. When going viral (good or bad) is only 20 seconds away, why waste time practicing. With 64gb of phone memory, and a 90 second attention span, we can always be performing. Far better to catch that lightning in a bottle moment by chance, than miss it while practicing right?

For those of us old enough to remember life before AOL's “You’ve got mail”, when call waiting was cutting edge, and a bibliography was a journey through the Encyclopedia Britannica, we have a responsibility.? We need to remember the time when we were not always connected or switched on.? We need to remember that part of the reason we are successful today is because we practiced yesterday.? The advanced society we have gifted to the graduating class of 2022 is no doubt a blessing many times over.? However, in our quest to eliminate the inconveniences of life, so that we might always be at peak performance, we may have failed to account for the importance of practice.??

The jr. little league analogy, although true, is metaphor meant to be visualized in a context that you understands and can influence.? For me, as a mid career technologist, my context is the future of my field.? The women and men starting in technology today, who don’t don’t have a BG and AG (before google, after google) frame of reference.? The aspiring professionals who don’t have ten years of pre-covid experience, sitting 3 feet away from a seasoned mentor, learning by osmosis and rarely if ever being on camera.? This new workforce has a desire to be connected to a cause they are passionate about, challenging employers to to attract and retain talent this next generation of talent. Traditional incentives including compensation, growth opportunities, exciting office settings as we begin hybrid work arrangements, etc. are all necessary. Alternatively, consider the value that comes with teaching the next generation that not only is acceptable to practice before preforming, but it is strongly encouraged. Take a step further and provide methods of practice that work in your field, because we know that practice does not make perfect...rather practice makes permanent.

The effectiveness of mentoring our emerging workforce on the necessity of practice will be difficult to measure. However, failing to correct the notion that performance no longer requires practice may be one of the most significant missed opportunities in our generation. Most will agree that failure is inevitable, with or without practice.? I believe that the employee who fails a performance without practice, is likely to walk away taking with them the time we invested and potential the employee has to offer.? On the other hand, the employee who fails a performance, having adequately practiced, is likely to rise up from the failure, learn from the experience, and increase the effort and impact that employee is contributing to the organization.

Call to Action:

Telling someone to watch YouTube videos on running will not make that person successful in running a marathon.? Teach someone the art of preparation, so that when they fail while performing, they are inspired to come back stronger.

References:

Shark Tank Fiberfix