What does practicing have to do with anything?
Long before I became a designer, I was a musician. At age five—with the help of my trusty toy piano—I taught all my dolls how to play and sing. They were quite the virtuosic bunch. Later, through high school honors band, then undergraduate music studies, and finally graduate music school, I learned the fundamentals for how to practice. I learned how to learn.
To achieve true artistry in musical performance, I first had to master the basic elements. And not just once, but over and over and over. As I have since shifted my career to design and strategy training, I’ve found this concept of practice is almost entirely absent in adult learning.
It seems so obvious to me that music can help.
That’s done. Next!
I observe a tendency for adult learners to go from novelty to novelty—the mindset is, “That’s done. Time to move on.” Courses focus primarily on sharing information or moving through a proprietary process. The posts I see on LinkedIn suggest that learning is about doing something new, developing new skills, taking on new challenges. Notice that repeated word: new.
It’s true that encountering new experiences and information will likely increase knowledge. But acquiring knowledge and information isn’t the problem. We don’t truly learn something until we act on it.
There’s a lack of emphasis on encoding behaviors into skills that can happen automatically. When we don’t have to think about the mechanics of a skill, we can think about the challenge at hand. Even better, if we can apply a skill to a new situation, we might bring about an innovative result.
The point is to tackle interesting challenges, not to waste energy on how to do a thing. Cooking for your potential in-laws is not when you want to be making your first soufflé.
Isolating skills and then bundling them into compound activities increases the odds of achieving a goal when it’s critical for the whole performance to come together.
The missing piece is to craft a deliberate strategy for building true proficiency.
Where does music come into it?
A few months ago, I settled into a plush velvet seat to watch Joshua Bell perform with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. His interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major was exquisite. Breathtaking. However astonishing, that sublime artistry was made possible by a simple structure, multiplied by years of deliberate practice.
But it’s not just Joshua Bell—this structure forms the foundation for ALL musical practice. It’s a pyramid of three levels:
Foundational Techniques
Studies
Performance Pieces
Foundational Techniques vary slightly between instruments, but are isolated skills such as scales, articulation, dynamics, etc.
Studies—also known by their French name, études—are short musical pieces that sound almost like an artistic composition but are focused on one foundational technique used repetitively through the piece. Practicing études allowed me to break from the (mind-numbing) repetition of an individual technique and apply it to a scenario much closer to what I would find in a performance piece.
Performance Pieces are those solo or ensemble compositions to perform for an audience (hopefully leaving them as breathless as Joshua left our audience).
Cool, but how does that help with anything NOT music?
Over the years, dozens of music teachers taught me in remarkably similar ways. Despite their idiosyncrasies and specialties, there was a common underlying structure to their madness. It’s this structure that can be extracted from the concert hall and applied to non-musical challenges.
What you need is a situation where performance depends on the successful application of a set of skills. Then it’s a simple (but not easy!) process to fill in the blanks of the practice structure.
Individual Skills
are brought together in
Compound Activities
that help achieve a
Big Picture Goal.
A non-musical example
To test my theory, I applied it to a personal goal of improving my nutrition. I selected a whole-foods, plant-based diet that promises long-term disease prevention and health.
Switching to a plants-only diet was a bit intimidating, so I wondered if my practice structure would make adoption easier. I knew non-starchy vegetables and protein would be important, so after scouring multiple books, cookbooks, and documentaries, I zeroed in on four keystone elements: a Grain, a Green, a Bean, and a Fruit.
Grain: any whole, unprocessed grain
Green: any leafy green
Bean: any legume, tofu, seitan, or tempeh
Fruit: serving of any fruit
Including at least three of these elements in every meal sets me well on my way to a healthier eating plan. This plan emphasizes non-starchy vegetables, and the “Bean” serves as a proxy for protein—which is also found in grains and most vegetables. The rhyming mnemonic helps me evaluate recipes and make decisions at the grocery store.
The four elements ladder up into meals, which equate to compound activities in the practice structure. Those meals repeated over time become my nutrition plan—the big picture goal.
Instead of being overwhelmed by meal plans and distracted by elaborate recipes, I focused on one food group at a time without changing other behaviors yet. For several weeks, I focused on incorporating a whole grain into each meal. When that started to feel natural, I added in a green. Every few weeks, I added another element to focus on. It was astonishing how easily these became new habits.
If I had started with a complete meal or list of recipes to follow, I wouldn’t have understood the underlying mechanics for how to continue on my own for the long run.
The benefit of constraints
Paradoxically, this structure minimizes the number of decisions I need to make, while allowing for near infinite flexibility. I can quickly evaluate recipes against the mnemonic as decision criteria. The only limit to potential flavor combinations is my imagination.
Perhaps the most important benefit of a structure like this is its potential for momentum. By breaking down a goal into foundational elements, there are many entry points for practice that aren’t dependent on having a project to work on immediately. This makes it easier to keep the practice going—and bring goals to life.
Joshua Bell wasn’t thinking about how to hold his bow or where to place his fingers—his energy was on expressing his unique interpretation of the music. His years of practice to isolate skills and re-combine them was the driving force. I am convinced that nearly everything can be broken down in the same way, leading to practically infinite potential for learning.
Practicing is a superpower.