You’ve been lied to about what practicing actually means.
Seriously. Most of us grew up hearing that "practice makes perfect," a phrase so ubiquitous it's basically woven into our DNA. But if you spend three hours mindlessly strumming a guitar while watching Netflix, you aren't practicing. You’re just hanging out with a piece of wood.
What does practicing mean at its core? It isn’t just repetition. It’s a physiological and psychological intervention. It is the deliberate act of stressing a specific system—whether that’s your motor cortex, your prefrontal cortex, or your hamstrings—to force an adaptation. If there is no struggle, there is no practice. There is only "doing."
The Biology of Getting Good
When we talk about practice, we’re really talking about myelin.
Back in 2009, journalist Daniel Coyle wrote The Talent Code, which brought this obscure neurological insulation into the mainstream. Myelin is a fatty substance that wraps around your neural pathways. Think of it like the plastic insulation on a copper wire. Every time you fire a circuit—say, by practicing a backhand in tennis—you signal your brain to add another layer of myelin to that specific wire.
The thicker the insulation, the faster and more accurately the signal travels.
This is why "talent" is often just a high-resolution map of myelinated pathways built over years. But here’s the kicker: the brain only adds myelin when the circuit is fired with precision. If you’re sloppy, you’re insulating a messy circuit. You are literally getting better at being bad.
It’s kind of terrifying when you think about it. Every time you "practice" a bad habit, you are physically hardwiring it into your skull.
The Anders Ericsson Factor
We can't talk about what practicing means without mentioning K. Anders Ericsson. He was the psychologist who spent his life studying "Deliberate Practice." He’s the guy whose research was famously (and somewhat incorrectly) distilled into the "10,000-hour rule" by Malcolm Gladwell.
Ericsson’s work wasn't about the quantity of time. It was about the quality of the focus.
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He found that top-tier violinists or chess grandmasters didn't just play more; they played differently. They focused on the things they couldn't do. Most people, when they sit down to "practice," do things they are already comfortable with because it feels good. It’s an ego boost. True practice, however, feels exhausting. It’s cognitively taxing.
If you aren't making mistakes, you aren't practicing. You’re just performing for yourself.
Why Your Brain Hates True Practice
Practicing is hard because it’s a form of failure.
Imagine you’re learning a new language. You can spend an hour on an app matching pictures of apples to the word "manzana." It feels productive. You get a little gold star. But that isn't really practicing the language. Practicing is when you sit across from a native speaker and try to explain your childhood with a vocabulary of 50 words. Your brain will physically hurt. You’ll sweat. You’ll feel stupid.
That discomfort is the feeling of growth.
The Swedish psychologist Torkel Klingberg, who looks at working memory, has shown that when we push the limits of our cognitive capacity, we actually see changes in the density of dopamine receptors in the cortex. We are changing the hardware. But the hardware doesn't want to change. It’s energy-intensive. Your body would much rather stay in its current state of "good enough."
The Difference Between Playing and Practicing
Let’s get specific.
In the world of gaming, there’s a massive gap between a "casual" and a "pro." A casual player might play 40 hours of League of Legends a week. They play games, they win some, they lose some. They stay in the same rank for three years.
A pro practices. They don't just "play games." They might spend four hours doing nothing but "last-hitting" minions to perfect their gold income. They’ll watch a 30-second replay of a single team fight for two hours, analyzing every pixel of movement.
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That is what practicing means. It is the deconstruction of a complex skill into its smallest, most manageable parts, and then obsessively refining those parts until they are automatic.
The Feedback Loop Crisis
You cannot practice in a vacuum.
Without a feedback loop, you’re just guessing. This is why coaching is so vital. A coach isn't there to cheer you on—they’re there to be your external nervous system. They see the hitch in your swing or the hesitation in your speech that you’ve become "blind" to.
If you don't have a coach, you have to find ways to record yourself. Musicians do this by recording their sessions and listening back at half speed. It’s brutal. You’ll hear every flat note and every rushed rhythm. But that's the only way to identify the "error" that needs fixing.
Real practice requires a "feedback-rich environment."
- Identify a specific, tiny goal (e.g., "I will play these four bars without tensing my shoulder").
- Execute the attempt with 100% focus.
- Evaluate the result objectively (Did I tense? Yes/No).
- Adjust the approach and repeat.
Practicing as a Lifestyle, Not a Task
Most people think of practice as something you "do" between 5:00 PM and 6:00 PM.
But for people like Kobe Bryant—who famously showed up to the gym at 4:00 AM while his teammates were still asleep—practicing was a state of being. It was a commitment to "Kaizen," the Japanese philosophy of continuous, incremental improvement.
If you improve by just 1% every day, the compound interest of that skill is staggering.
However, we have to acknowledge the dark side. Burnout is real. You can’t live in a state of high-intensity deliberate practice 24/7. The best in the world, according to Ericsson’s data, usually cap their intense practice at about four hours a day. Beyond that, the brain is too fried to fire the circuits accurately. You start practicing mistakes.
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The Myth of "Natural Talent"
Honestly, the word "talent" is kind of an insult.
When you see a virtuoso pianist, and you say, "Wow, they’re so talented," you are effectively erasing the 15,000 hours they spent in a room alone, frustrated and failing. You’re seeing the product, not the process.
Research into "Super-agers" and elite performers suggests that what we call talent is often just a high tolerance for the boredom and frustration of practice. It’s the ability to stay focused on a "boring" fundamental for longer than the next person.
Practicing means being okay with being bored. It means being okay with being bad for a very long time.
How to Actually Practice Better Starting Today
If you want to move the needle, you have to stop "doing" and start "practicing."
Stop multitasking. You cannot practice while listening to a podcast unless the thing you are practicing is "listening to podcasts." The neural signaling required for myelination demands "deep work," a term coined by Cal Newport. It requires a singular, focused channel.
Try the "Slow Down" method. If you’re trying to learn a physical movement, do it so slowly that it feels ridiculous. If you can't do it perfectly at 10% speed, you have no business trying it at 100% speed. You’re just hoping for luck at that point.
Actionable Insights for Your Next Session:
- Shrink the Map: Pick one tiny thing. Not "I’m practicing golf." Say, "I am practicing the rotation of my left wrist during the takeaway."
- Embrace the Suck: If you feel frustrated, tell yourself, "This is the feeling of my brain changing." It reframes the negative emotion as a progress bar.
- Short Bursts: 20 minutes of intense, focused practice is worth more than two hours of mindlessly going through the motions.
- Record and Review: Use your phone. Record your speech, your lift, your playing. Watch it like a stranger would. The camera doesn't lie, even when your ego does.
Understanding what practicing means changes your relationship with failure. It’s no longer a sign that you’re bad at something; it’s the data you need to get better. The goal isn't to get it right. The goal is to practice until you can't get it wrong.
That shift in perspective is the difference between being a hobbyist and being a master.
Stop playing. Start practicing. Build the circuits.