Tyler Cowen writes:
Tyler Cowenone of my favorite questions to bug people with has been “What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?”
If you trained for a marathon 5 years ago, finished it and quit practicing right after, do you think you could run a marathon tomorrow?
Unless you’d become an endurance athlete in another discipline, you probably couldn’t finish that marathon. Yet that’s how we treat knowledge work.
There seems to be an assumption that once you have your degree, you’re done learning. Maybe you sprinkle learning intervals throughout your career to get a promotion or gain access to a new industry.
But we tend to see learning as a strategy to achieve something else outcomes.
Practice, we seem to think, is transitory. Once we get the certificate, promotion or job, we’re done learning and can do the real thing.
That attitude keeps us from growing and slows our learning.
Sure, learning happens on the job through mentorship and feedback, but the pressure is always on. You always have to perform, which means you’ll do what’s safe to get the result you and your boss want. It’s like an athlete competing every day and never practicing.
Practice gives us freedom to push the boundaries. If we try something new in practice, we can fail in safety. And when we give ourselves permission to fail, we also gain the opportunity to find the breakthroughs we miss when the pressure’s on.
We might get accolades, rewards and money when we have to perform. But we get the skills that get us there from practice.