You might have the experience how usually at the very beginning process of practicing a skill, we tend to progress quite rapidly, yet after some initial progress and successes, the further we get and the more things we actually learn the more our progress tends to slow down gradually...
Because progress in itself is a process of adaptation. The universal reason why we become better in a skill is not out of the false belief of repetition but happens because of adaptation.
Repetition is part of it, but it does matter what your repetition is about. Repetition becomes only valuable as long as it sends a signal to our mind and body, for it to adapt itself to the stress we are putting it through.
If the signal isn't strong enough to initiate this "survival" mode, our skills won't progress just the same as our muscles won't grow.
Understanding this makes it easy to see why whenever we just start out learning a skill from zero, it immediately pushes our limits and why as a result we progress.
It's the reason why progress at the beginning stages tends to happen rapidly and predictably because we push ourselves in that stage almost continually.
The real problem actually starts once you start advancing and fill up your practice session with rehearsing more and more things that aren't as new or pushing your skills anymore.
One of the essential things they have found is that, if you want to get better at something, you cannot do it in an "autonomous stage". You can't get better on autopilot.
As a general rule, it could be said that if you are coming close towards learning something, whether a certain move or trick or skill where it's at a level of reaching almost close to becoming autopilot, where some of your attention is able to drift off while practicing it, it's time to move on to something harder.
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Shawn Lane probably didn't become as famous as he should have been, but the things I've heard about this guy is that if you try to play guitar and you watch him play it's almost impossible how fast he can play.
And it's not like a little more impossible than anybody else who plays guitar, it's like everybody else at the top who plays guitar on a level that is so complex that it's technically impossible and then there's like Shawn Lane and between them is this giant gap.
Now he might not have been writing the best music, but as far as it goes playing it, he was technically perfect.
And as I was doing some research about him I came across one of his interviews where someone asked, how do you build up the speed, how do you learn to play that insanely fast?
He answered the way I do it is not the way most people teach to do it. What I do is, I play the scale, and the guitar lick faster than I can play it. I try to play it faster than I can play it and I screw up as I try to do it that way, but I keep playing it faster than I can play it and I try to adapt myself to the speed...
And with time I learn to play it that much faster when I move a slight degree back from my limits. Coming back from that point the speed doesn't even seem as hard anymore.
So rather than how anybody else who teaches it, that is to do it slowly and build up the difficulty step by step and go a little bit faster and a little bit faster, he said the important thing is learning the basics right and as soon as you have the basics learned, train on your limits.
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Why do we keep practicing the same thing everyday?
This is because of a process is called "Myelination" by modern neuroscience.
Myelination is a process where paths are paved inside our mind similarly like a highway is paved, and it's literally paving a road on which we follow through each time we come to the same situation.
The very first time you choose and make a decision, the road has been chosen, but as we continue to take the same pathways, it becomes easier each time to go on the same road the next time, and we keep paving over it once we start using them.
And if we connect this concept to practicing, I have a simple question for you.
If our practice session consists of 99% the same things we do basically every day, day after day...
Do we challenge ourselves enough throughout the day in our practice?
What would you say, how much of the things that you practice every day and the routines that you go about are on the same difficulty level as yesterday and the day before?
The answer might be probably almost 100%. The reality is that if 99% of what you do in your practice is almost the same as the day before, your results according to that are changing probably slowly as well.
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Now that we already might know we have to push our limits in order to progress, but there's a couple of problems we might run into.
How can you make time for new things if your practice is already filled up and you don't even have time to practice all the things you already can do or need to work on?
What is the best way to prioritize the skills to practice and plan in a way to get the maximum effect?
When would you say is the most logical time to practice a new advanced skill or trick in your practice session?
What would be the right time to do it? In the BEGINNING, the MIDDLE, or the END of your practice session?
To answer this, we need to take a deeper look at our ENERGY & FOCUS LEVEL.
Throughout the day, we only have a certain amount of focus and energy. The green line represents our energy and focus level that we can take to concentrate on a certain task.
When we start out, this line is obviously at its peak, but as we practice, our energy gets used up and it gets lower throughout our practice session.
So what level of energy is needed to overcome your current skill level? What is needed to overcome your current abilities and to literally overcome your limits? High level or low level energy.
The answer is obvious. Winners either practice new skills at the beginning or in the middle of their practice session.
When practicing "New Level Skill", they build a much faster warmup road towards it than others and start practicing it when their energy is still high.
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Winners' biggest and foremost priority is always, and I literally mean ALWAYS progress.
Everything else comes after it.
First comes the progress in the new level skill, and if that's achieved, then nothing else really matters for them. In this mindset... If you didn't get better, you haven't achieved essentially anything, so to speak.
Now, Winners don't care how much they need to work for a certain result. As long as they can get the result, they really don't care how much work it'll take.
Their priority is progress, and that's why they start their practice with the intention of progressing.
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Have you ever met someone who was bragging about how many hours he usually practiced but didn't seem to get better at all?
These are the losers. Their mindset is focused usually on the amount of timely work they are getting done versus actually getting work done.
It's a prank, their own mind plays on them. You might hear things like, today I practiced five hours and I've gone through all of my routines, and that already gives a feeling of accomplishment, but they essentially did not really achieve any significant new results, and that is why they actually didn't improve.
They just remained at the level they already were at and prevailed to get worse.
WINNERS MINDSET
MOTIVATED BY GAIN
PUTS PRIORITY ON PROGRESS
MEASURES SUCCESS BASED ON RESULTS
LOSERS MINDSET
MOTIVATED BY FEAR
PUTS PRIORITY ON "ROUTINES"
MEASURES SUCCESS BASED ON TIME SPENT
Winners make choices not based on any logic. It's instinct based. It's a mindset, and what drives their mindset is a different emotion. They are motivated by gain and progress rather than motivated by fear of losing something, and looking at each day for a new progress to be made.
Their motivation doesn't come from avoiding loss, but gaining even more to the level they already have and achieved. It's simply the "winner's mentality" that goes forward to get what it wants while on the other side, avoiding loss and fearing it becomes the "loser's mentality".
So no matter how logical and rational we think we are, all of our interpretations come from our mindsets, but our mindsets get built first of all by our emotions.
Those who don't have their focus on results usually prefer to measure their success on a timely basis rather than actual results.
They trick their own mind into thinking they achieved something instead of looking at the harsh reality. And it's an incredibly unproductive and self fooling mentality. The actual value of your practice is always equal to the results you got.
And Winners will not consider prevailing getting worse as a good result. A good result is always progress, even if it's only by an inch.
And interestingly, if you take the mindset of only looking at the results when measuring the worth of your practice, you will actually lose track of how much time or energy you put into it.
It can allow you to practice even more than you ever did before or even less because you focus on the right thing, which creates progress and lets you achieve your goals a lot faster.
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Now, here we will talk about the 90% consistency rule which is actually the secret to making any skill consistent.
It's been said that most non-naturals believe that in order to get a skill really consistent, the only option is to rehearse it over and over again no matter how repetitive or boring it is.
The problem is, even if you keep practicing the same move for weeks, month, or years, it won't seem to get really that consistent. So to avoid wasting time and energy, we are going to dive deeper into the principle that took me a lot of time and energy to clarify and make it really clear and sharp.
And with the mindset of this technique alone, I really believe that you will be able to not only avoid rehearsing boring routines, but progress at least 3X faster.
And I named this principle the "90% Consistency Rule". It's a rule that a lot of my principles are built on and it goes like this... In order to make a move or skill consistent, it's necessary to understand that there's a 90% rule to learning anything.
By learning a movement or skill, usually the first 90% of learning it is going to be relatively quick compared to how much time it takes to learn it to a 100%.
However, it's the last 10-20%, which creates most of the problems when it comes to really learning it.
And that very end, that last 10% of a skill can take often twice or as much as three times, more time and energy than it took reaching the first 90% of learning it.
Now, how is that possible? Why would the last 10% take three or more times as much energy and time than the first 90% did?
Why does progress seem not only to slow down, but get literally hand-braked as you get closer to your goal?
Now it gets hand-braked because of one simple reason...
As you advance in your skill and get better and better at the move, which at the beginning demanded all of your concentration and challenged all of your skills to its maximum state, it simultaneously also started to get less and less challenging and less and less demanding...
And because it got less and less challenging, the need for "adaptation" got lower and lower the BETTER you actually became.
What naturals usually would do, instead of spending three times as much time to get that last 10% handled, they would just learn a 2nd move that is slightly more difficult but similar in nature to the 1st move, and try to get the first 90% learned in the 2nd move, which would keep their skill challenged to the maximum amount.
Now once they've practiced and reached 90% in the 2nd move, they would come back to the one they wanted to get consistent earlier, before the easier skill.
And that way, working on the last 10% of that move almost just solved itself and needs almost just a little polishing. By coming from something much harder to something easier with very little practice, the 1st move easily became 100% consistent.
And that's what I named the "Two steps forward, one step back method" of consistency.
After that, they go on to the 3rd move and reach 90% of that 3rd move before going back to completed the last 10% of the 2nd move.
And so it goes without ever having an end to your skill evolution. There's always going to be another newer skill in order to improve in because it's a game with infinite levels.