What can you learn from a jolly good practice

I recently came across an article by Jorge Yau on Medium.

It that told the story of how a high school teacher once held an experimental pottery class where the class was divided in two and would be graded differently.

The first group would be graded based on the quality of their best pot while the second group would be graded based on the number of pots created.

Which do you think would produce the highest quality pot?

If you’re like me, you’d vote for the quality group – after all I’ve been indoctrinated for 50 years to value quality and perfection – getting something right.

Fast forward to the end of the term and what we find is that while not striving for perfection, the second group had produced not only far more pots but that they were of a far superior quality.?

The group tasked with producing the best quality pot could barely produce a lump of clay.?These students were hampered by two things:

1. Cripplingly high expectations that led to a fear of failure

2. A belief that the only thing they were striving for was perfection

In the first case these students were so afraid of imperfection that they chose not to use humanity’s greatest gift – the ability to learn and grow from failure.

In the second case the students mindset was limited to what they thought they needed to do.?Once they had created what they thought was a ‘perfect’ pot they lost interest and stopped.

On the other hand by focusing on creating as many pots as possible the second group was no longer constrained by fear of failure.?They had the freedom to experiment, make mistakes, iterate and develop their own creativity and intuition.?In time their confidence grew.?Soon enough they could produce vastly different pots with ease – the sign of true genius.

You don’t need to be the best to do your best work.

You just need to put in the hours.?The blood, toil, sweat and tears.

I’ve been back rowing for the last 8 years.?I’ve always avoided the rowing machine.?But six weeks ago I decided I should get back on it.?I’ve done 3,000m every morning bar Sundays.?For the first three weeks I made little improvement, but for the last three I’ve noticed real gains.?When I started it was taking me over 13 minutes to do the 3,000m – now I’m down to 12.

Every day I hear my wife (a cello teacher) engaging her students.?She’s a master coach – she’s got a wealth of knowledge at her fingertips, she knows how to personalise her approach to every student, she gives short, sharp, bite sized chunks of tuition to finesse every detail, and she is suitably theatrical and dramatic in her delivery (to me too).?But one thing she reminds all her students is the power of doing a jolly good practice every day.?And the results, well, they speak for themselves.

Over the years I’ve been crap at investing.?I can either believe that’s who I am, or I can choose to do the preparation and the work and master it.?So I commit to doing 30 minutes of learning and practice every day for the next 100 days.

Every building begins with one brick, every Landrover rebuild starts with one nut, every journey with one step.??

Focus on the journey not the destination.?Who knows where it will take you.?Just keep going.

In my mind it’s quantity, not quality, that leads to perfection.

Or as the boss would say, a jolly good practice every day.