Learning Mastery 2 - Post Practice Improvement
May 10th, 2008
This is the second part of my Learning Mastery series. In Learning Mastery 1, I shared with you the power of feedback. I explained why the best feedback is positive and specific, and how you can get more feedback to improve faster.
In this article, you’ll learn, among other things, why master pianists only practice one hour a day (the ten-hours-a-day practice is a myth), how taking breaks makes you learn FASTER and why you should welcome failure with open arms. You will also learn how to use the same principle as the master pianists to learn any new skill orders of magnitude faster.
Post-Practice Improvement (PPI)
A weight-lifter’s muscles don’t grow while he’s lifting weights. They grow between his work-outs.
Few people know that the same is true for learning skills. Learning is mostly building new and stronger neural connections. This is a slow process, and happens between practice sessions.
Master pianists have long been aware of this fact. They practice in such a way as to maximize Post-Practice Improvement (PPI). This means they learn a certain piece, then go away from their practice, and when they come back the next day, they can play the piece far better!
I first learned about PPI from the (free) e-book Fundemantals of Piano Practice. It’s a must-read for all you pianists out there.
Maximizing PPI
So how can YOU maximize your PPI when learning something new?
The first rule is this:
The last thing you do has by far the biggest impact on Post-Practice-Improvement.
Let’s say you’re learning to play tennis. It doesn’t matter if you serve correctly a hundred times in a row. If your last few serves go wrong because you use bad arm/hand movements, your brain will remember that. It will then emphasize the neural connections based on those incorrect moves. The next time you come to practice, your serve might be worse, not better.
In fact, this is not at all uncommon with pianists who don’t know about PPI. At the end of their practice sessions, they play through the piece at speed, with stress and mistakes. The next day, they come back and find that they play the piece worse than before.
So make sure the last thing during practice is your best. Use all the correct motions, and do it as relaxed as possible.
Taking a break
Another incredibly important technique for maximizing PPI is taking regular breaks. I’ve written about taking breaks before. I explained why it’s important to take a short break every 10-20 minutes, and a long 20-minute break every 90 minutes. But I didn’t share the whole story. Yes, breaks help you relax. Yes, breaks improve your concentration. Yes, breaks help you accomplish more. But there’s more:
Breaks also help you learn. They help you a lot.
During a practice session you might learn a bunch of different skills. Let’s go back to the tennis example. You might practice serving, running, forehand, backhand, playing close to the net and other skills. Let’s say your last serve is half an hour before the end of your practice session. It will still count for your serve’s PPI. As long as you took a break after practicing your serve.
I’m not sure why or how this works. I think it has something to do with the way brain stores tasks. It needs a break to move the task from working memory to PPI. It’s like when you’re sitting at a restaurant. You think of something really important and jot down a few notes on a napkin. But you’ll then need to transfer the notes somewhere else, like your master to-do list, in order to take action on them later.
Your brain needs to do the same. When you take a break, it runs through its working memory, and deals with the tasks there. It discards the stuff it no longer needs - that’s what makes you relaxed and refreshed after a break. It transfers other stuff to the subconscious, for dealing with long-term.
If you practice too long without taking a break, your working memory fills up. And since you’re not taking time to transfer the useful stuff to your long-term subconscious, the new stuff has nowhere to go. It gets lost, and with it you lose valuable learning experiences.
How PPI relates to feedback
Both Post-Practice Improvement and Feedback are essential for learning. But feedback comes first, which is why I chose to talk about it first.
During practice, you’re using feedback to improve your movements. But there’s only a certain number of things you can focus on consciously. You’ll need to transfer some of the more basic skills to your subconscious before you can focus on improving the smaller details. PPI does just that.
The great news is, feedback and PPI don’t just add up. They multiply. The better you use each one of them, the more effective the other becomes.
Welcoming failure
“Want me to give you a recipe for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.”
- Thomas Watson, founder of IBM
What would it be like if you welcomed failure? Not just wasn’t bothered by it, but actually welcomed it?
I’ve written before about learning from failure and then moving on. Every failure contains some valuable lessons, and it’s a great thing if you learn to extract them.
But lately, I’ve seen that failure is more valuable than I used to think. In fact, it’s so valuable, I’ve worked on increasing the amount of failure I experience. But I’ll tell you more about that next time.
Stay tuned for the next article in Learning Mastery series. I’ll share with you how to increase the amount of failure you enjoy (and why do it). I’ll also talk about how fun relates to learning (spoiler: The two of them usually support each other. Usually.)
Until next saturday.
Plop.
Update: Now available: Learning Mastery 3 - Fail Early, Fail Often
May 10th, 2008 at 12:03
Best article so far, hands down!
I just wonder why haven’t I read all this some 5 years ago
May 10th, 2008 at 23:13
This was really nice reading! I am a high-school student, and I hope that these tips will benefit me, so I will be able to study better
May 14th, 2008 at 19:06
@Mikael:
If you want advice about studying, read Scott Young’s article How To Ace Your Finals Without Studying. Great stuff there.
May 15th, 2008 at 3:40
Excellent guide on how to improve one’s productivity. I know it is odd but I can relate this to how I developed as a video gamer. A few hours a day playing in different roles and always changing the approach or method that I would work on. Now I can play as little as an hour a day to keep my skills tuned.
I’m referring to first person shooters and real time strategy games if anyone is curious. They take a lot of skill to master on a higher level.
A bit of a rant (sorry). Keep the great articles coming!