Practice makes it perfect

Yesterday I went on a bike ride of nearly 170km from Hamburg to the north coast of Germany, Timmendorferstrand, as part of my preparation for the Ironman and this time I decided to invite people on Facebook groups to accompany me, and I couldn’t have made a better choice as I had a flat tire on kilometer 13 and received a lot of help from my traveling companions. After that, the ride was a bit bumpy (literally), as my back tire had a bump on it, but I took a valuable lesson from this experience, practice makes perfect.

This (disputed) German saying couldn’t be more true in life. We attend many classes in our lifetime and some people even make it a profession, going into the brave position of teachers and professors, however, even them agree that the experience in the classroom is not enough to be capable to perform tasks with high accuracy and to improve your performance in an activity. Practice, on the other hand, will allow you to make mistakes, try again, and perfect your skills until you reach a breakthrough and go on to recreate something people thought was impossible before.

Today you can learn pretty much anything from the internet, from how to fry an egg to how to put a bicycle together, however, in my personal experience, the occasions when you can execute something with accuracy after receiving instructions only are rare, I always end up making some mistakes, but learning from them and making it better on the next try. This logic applies to all three priorities of my life now and might give you some insight on how to deal with your challenges.

My most important priority is my full-time job, where I help warehouse operations across Europe to get better through the implementation of Lean tools. I have been doing that for the past year and feel that the more sites I visit, the more coaching sessions, workshops I do or participate, the better I get on connecting with the local teams and making them understand the benefits of process improvements, also honing my change management execution skills. Right after that comes my two passions, sports and competitions, and coaching.

These two activities don’t take priority over each other and I try to dedicate roughly the same amount of time to both of them, except that my triathlon training can be done by myself while coaching needs at least one other person, so I jump into any opportunity of people asking for my help, and I admit that I do a lot of that with no charge, just to get some practice and reflect on it later, so I can learn. Recently I had young people contacting me from Singapore, Mexico and Germany getting in contact over social media and asking for advice in their job search, and I took all of them as ‘clients’ and I’m coaching them pro-bono to hone my skills, and I learn much more in these sessions then listening to podcasts, watching videos and reading books as I get to apply that knowledge and learn the best approach for my style of coaching.

Coming back to triathlon, I can say that you will never learn the important things about the sport from training by yourself or not getting into competitions. In my first two races, I made a lot of mistakes, from having to take a break from little details like starting in the front of the pack and getting swam over by nearly all the better swimmers to forgetting to drink water and electrolytes because I didn’t want to slow down. You don’t learn these things from training, only by competing.

This Sunday, 7th of June 2020, the half-Ironman supposed to happen in Kraichgau, Germany where I was taking part but unfortunately the current pandemic forced the organizers to postpone it to next year but regardless of that I still wanted to train, and I’ve got more than I bargained for: changing my first tire with my patch kit. It is not rocket science, however, I kept imagining having to do that in the middle of a race without having to do it before because, well, I never had a flat tire before. It all went well(ish) as I still have the bump in my tire but now I have the practice to all the videos I watched on youtube and I am confident that I can handle it coming to my next competitions because practice makes it perfect.

Vinicius Andriolo Operational Excellence Manager | Career Coach