Yesterday my chess app said “Let’s celebrate! You have played 10,000 games so far.” That’s a lot of games.
The dictum says practice makes perfect, but the reality is that my chess game is nowhere near perfect. My playing is arguably average. And so… why did practice not make perfect, as the dictum stipulates?
My theory is that I stopped caring about learning and improving my game many years ago. I play chess to pass time: in a queue, before I sleep, in the bathtub or while waiting for an order at a restaurant – it is simply another way of picking my nose.
And therein lies The Practice Myth. I know veteran doctors who, twenty years later, still practice in their old dilapidating surgeries; You probably have elders who, given their experiences, are supposed to be wiser; You may also know professionals that stopped growing decades ago. They still practise every day, but alas, they stopped caring about learning and instead of benefiting from practice, got stuck in a rut.
In a more technical sense, practice helps to strengthen our heuristics. In other words, we become more efficient at responding to similar situations. That is how we can drive without paying attention, or quickly say “I’m fine” whenever someone asks how you are doing. (Search my blog for ‘heuristics’ to learn more. The search bar is inside the menu panel at the bottom).
The danger is that heuristics do not improve the quality of decision-making. The quality of decision-making is improved through learning – that slow, tedious process of being wrong many times before you’re right.
Practice, therefore, only makes perfect what you already know. Learning, on the other hand, improves what we know. This means we need to improve the dictum from “Practice makes perfect” to “Learning and practice makes perfect.”
