Making Practice a Habit
“...and practice makes perfect and nobody’s perfect, so why bother?” —Tre Cool
“Practice makes perfect”, or at least that’s how the saying goes. Except as Tre Cool points out, nobody is perfect. Perfection is an illusion, an unattainable goal. Our pursuit of it is a frustration and a set up for failure.
For years I worked at a therapeutic boarding school for adolescent girls. Recognizing the problems that generally come with the pursuit of perfection, and wanting to encourage the development of healthy, enduring habits, we used to say that “practice makes permanent”. Better, yes, but accurate? Nope. A worthy goal? Not really. The problem here is that nothing is permanent, everything is always changing. No matter how much you practice, when you stop practicing, whatever skill or outcome you were chasing will ultimately fade.
Practice doesn’t make perfect, and it doesn’t make permanent. So why bother? Great question.
I like to say “Practice makes the habit of practicing”. This is more accurate. We tend to think of practice as linear, we follow the line of practice to the endpoint of the achievement. It doesn’t work this way, however. Practice is a cycle—practice leads to the habit of practice, which leads to more practice, and to greater habits, and so on. It is a lifelong process.
It is within this habit of practicing, this consistent and ongoing and lifelong process, where the magic happens. It’s where our bodies and our minds stay in shape, where we experience more enduring peace and happiness, where we maintain greater health, where we enjoy healthier relationships.
At the end of the day, life is one big practice. Perhaps more accurate, life is one big system of practices. There is no endpoint, we do not arrive at a skill, habit, state, or outcome and say “Phew, I’ve mastered that, now I can stop.” Once we do stop, whatever it is we have “achieved” begins the process of undoing itself. We may be able to get it back relatively easily if we decide to practice it again, but it will require more work than if we had never stopped practicing. We most likely won’t start where we left off, we will need to go back and recoup some loss. It does not matter what we are talking about here, this applies to just about everything.
Think about exercise. How many times have you “gotten into shape” and then stopped. Did you stay in shape? Think about relationships, working and personal. Have you ever spent time and energy building a good relationship with someone and then ignored it? Was it just waiting for you when you decided to come back, or had some distance developed between you? How many times have you pursued happiness, found a happy place and then believing you’ve achieved something great relaxed and let go? Did you just stay happy forever, or did you again find yourself feeling less than happy or like something was missing? I could go on.
We tend to see our life’s pursuits as having endpoints or goals. “Once I do this or that, then I will be...” We tend to look outside of ourselves for reference points, for tangible and achievable measures of our success at our practices. We then accept these external measures as signs that we’ve arrived and our practice can stop. The problem here is that when we arrive, we don’t just stay put. We keep changing.
If we decide that practice is the goal in and of itself, accepting that perfection and permanence are illusions, we truly can change our lives. We must reject the endpoints we have spent so much of our lives pursuing—things like fitness, body proportions, happiness, peace, wealth, abundance, material things, etc., and rather accept the “endpoint” of practice. We need to accept the practice of fitness, body, happiness, peace, wealth, abundance, and material gain.
Let’s shift our perspective on practice. If practice is about perfection and no one is perfect, or if practice is about permanence and nothing is permanent, then why bother?
Bother because the gifts we seek lie within the practice.
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