It is said that practice makes perfect. And this is a good sentiment. There is the discussion of the ten-thousand hours idea, where the psychological idea is discussed that rote practice is at times just as or more beneficial to our skill development than the thorough academic study of a topic. Hours of academic study and hours of rote practice both matter, of course. But study without practice remains in the realm of hypothesis rather than action. Armchair philosophy over pragmatics. Via action, we learn the way of the ropes through successive interaction with reality. We hone our intuitions and instincts.
In the deeper discussion of psychology this gets into the nature of memory and consciousness. Things like semantic memory versus spatial memory versus muscle memory. Engaging all of these facets of our perceptual experience and knowledge acquisition matters. One might say that many hours spent learning something in all the various ways one can be immersed in experiencing it is what gives one expertise.
So, sure; practice makes perfect. In general, anyways, we say things like this not because they capture deep universal truths about reality, but because they resonate with our understandings of the human condition.
When I was in college in Montana, I took Taekwondo for a year. My Taekwondo master taught me a lot about things like the culture of honor and determination, and martial arts, of course. He was a man of good character, and a good role model. One quote he used to say that always stuck out to me was practice makes permanent, not perfect. It is more fitting to the nuances of a complex, non-idealist reality.
While engaging extendedly in both the physical and mental experience of a topic or skillset matters, the way we go about that engagement itself is vastly important. Engaging with the dialogue of humanity that has been built up to this point around a topic matters. Access to the tools needed to engage in the physical or academic inquiry matters. And if we are too loose about the process of skill development, we risk actually habituating quite less than optimal habits. We might not even take into consideration the idea of optimization.
This is precisely why, while practice is great, we need not feel like we have to reinvent the wheel in every new endeavor or understanding we undertake. Being an independent thinker with a hope to contribute your own genuine ideas to the ongoing dialogue of humanity is a good quality to value, but it is by extended engagement with the theories and techniques others have pioneered before us that we can most efficiently grow our skillset towards expertise.
That is not saying one has to copy others, or that rigid imitation is necessarily really the best form of flattery. Innovation on top of engagement is the fun part, and what makes one truly stand out in their field of expertise. The important thing to remember is that reality is nuanced. Both hands-on and intellectual practice matter. But in the pursuit of carving one’s own path of creative expression and understanding, if we don’t engage with the history of humanity’s dialogue, we risk ending up getting caught up kicking around sand out front of the gates of eternity. We might make a few pretty pictures in the dust. But we may get stuck striving to idealize sub-optimal patterns as our perfect, never truly reaching towards true optimization.
That is, if objective optimization is a real thing. In the arts, this is less so, but not completely not so. In the philosophical and psychological discussion of aesthetics, we see that there is still a beholding of frameworks of ‘better’ or tastes, even if they may be objectively relative on an absolute level of considering reality, not mandating a decisive ‘best’. Even if using a certain amount of flour is essential to better making a muffin, there will be no precise amount that makes the objectively best muffin, because that remains in the realm of relative appraisal. We will think of better and more innovative ways to make and use gears optimally, even if we seem to have stumbled on the most optimal gear geometry, which is one that can best emulate spherical degrees of freedom. The arts remain largely interpretational, however. In creative immersion, concepts like perfectionism and optimization often take a back seat to experiential talent of expression, outside the realm of theory building or pragmatics. Uniqueness, and perspective, remains salient.
So, engage with the dialogue of humanity, but be boldly yourself. If we want practice to make its closest approximation of perfect, we must keep striving towards innovation in the pursuit of real optimization, or at least the advancement of the arts and techniques. If we don’t, practice will simply make permanent, not perfect, or optimal. We may think we are masters of momentum, but only know about linear momentum, and have never even considered angular momentum. We may think we are masters of math in a pre-calculus understanding society, while differential equations sway the reality around us, nonetheless. Nature is a chaotic optimizer. One needs only study paths of efficiency, soap bubbles, or the anatomy of our muscles to grow a deeper appreciation for the complex dynamics underlying reality.
What was my point when I started writing this… In the one part of the video, you will see me heating the silver for a little too long, with pair of tweezers that was holding the strip of silver a little too tight. And those are things I easily develop a sense not to let happen too often just by engaging in the practice of the creative expression. I have a good muscle memory for how close to hold the torch and when to know I should stop soldering a piece. But I still know that I must engage both openly and creatively with growing my understanding of the craft. Like any other study, or practice, while we may enjoy the process of making our unique contribution, we do so within an existing objective framework of reality. We can get to know the framework, and how it truly optimizes, or we can have fun making our few pretty pictures while standing largely adjacent to the larger dialogue.
Practice should strive towards optimal yet retain creative application and expression. We need both the renaissance man (the knower of all topics) and the jack of all trades (the doer of all things). At the pinnacle the two converge as the applied academic. We dive selflessly into the future, innovating for all out of genuine love for the pursuit for truth and expression, while experiencing the mystifying feeling of unmasking the mysticism of reality into the structured understandings of science and the arts.
Day after edit:
A final thought on practice makes permanent, to speak a little less hyperbolically. This saying conveys a similar sentiment to the phrase ‘old habits die hard.’ As a jewelry maker, I have spent over two years trying to get my jewelry making partner to close the water nozzle on the rock polisher after he turns off the machine, so that I don’t have to spend my first minute using the machine after him trying to figure out which nozzle he left open, so that the water pressure goes correctly to the nozzle I need to be using. It takes two seconds, and is a more efficient consideration, to turn the nozzle off after using the machine. But time and time again he fails to consider it. Why? Because before I started using the machine as well, there was nobody to tell him that he should think about turning the nozzle off, so that became his habit, through successive practice.
My brother left his bathroom fan on 24/7 for so long that it broke. One of my fellow students in Taekwondo class could never do good side kicks because he never corrected his bad foot placement that he started with.
What is one of the best things you can do about this? Learn and make a habit out of the right way to do things in the first place. Or if you don’t learn the right way first, at least start to engage with the dialogue of humanity and learn about the ways the habit or idea can be better optimized. This is one of the main functions of education, to help us develop the ‘more correct’ understandings and efficient habits that have been built up through the course of human inquiry, without having to spend most of our lives going through the trial and error process in isolation, likely never discovering most of the things we really need to know before habituating what seems like a ‘good enough way to do things to get by’. It is through mindful interaction with a topic, both physically and mentally, we strive towards expertise. Ultimately, we can get the better of our old inefficient or uninformed habits, even if they exist in realms where there is not an objective best. But we must take the steps into both understanding and uniqueness if we want practice not to make permanent, or at least to not risk being unaware of living within the assumed framework of an inefficient permanence.
