Practice makes perfect?
This year, my sister gave me a book I love to hate. Chances are, you’ve heard me complain about it at one point or another. It’s called: Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy by Sarah Ban Breathnach.
It has a lot of assignments in it, and being a very “Type A” personality, I fully dove into hating the book for all the assignments I chose not to complete. Perhaps you can relate to this characteristic of holding books personally responsible for your shortcomings.
But the thing is, I talk about this book all the time. And when I do the assignments, they literally change my life.
At the start, there were a lot of notebooks and magazines I was instructed to buy. A lot of cutting and pasting and crafting. Flower-sniffing. Cake-baking. It was altogether too much of a homemaking, doily-crocheting, knickknack-collecting instruction book for my liking.
Just the sight of a sewing needle puts me into a cold sweat!
Also early on in the book, Breathnach declares: “just put the book down and walk away if you aren’t going to do this one thing”. And that was the type of challenge I just couldn’t pass up. What is that one thing? Writing down 5 things I’m grateful for everyday in a special, beautiful book that I bought and use exclusively for this one daily purpose. I’ve learned so much from this daily practice of gratitude.
Another lesson I learned, which I reference in my blog post about John Cleese and creativity, is to set aside an hour of creative problem solving every week. Breathnach calls these “creative excursions” and I truly fought this one tooth and nail. I mean, who has time to take 2 hours to frivolously spend at a museum, or an antique shop or a library?? But when I realized I could use this creative excursion to go on a trip inside my mind and look at a problem I wanted to solve, I was completely hooked.
The other day, I saw a social media post on perfectionism killing self-worth. Not in and of itself the most surprising post: I think that artists are beginning to realize that we often replace the goal for excellence and optimization with a goal for perfection.
But reading Breathnach’s October 3rd entry “Little Miss Perfect” on the very same day as seeing this on social media really grabbed my attention.
Here’s what she says:
Like workaholism, aspiring to be Little Miss Perfect is an addiction of low self worth.
Ummm…
She goes on to say:
When we were young, nothing we did was ever good enough, so we just kept on doing until doing was all we could do. When doing more and more didn’t make a difference, we thought if we did our work perfectly, we’d hit the mark. When we did, suddenly voices other than our own sang our praises… We’re creatures who live by our senses, and since the response we got for perfection felt wonderful – even if for only 10 seconds – we wanted to repeat the experience. So we committed to doing everything perfectly, setting in motion a cycle of self-destruction that frequently felt as comfortable as a straitjacket.
A few years back, I started playing for a lot of voice lessons. Not being an incredibly strong sight-reader at the time, I recognized that a strength I could tap into was if I could play the notes accurately the first time, usually by playing through slowly enough to accomplish this accurate reading, I could substantially cut down on my practice time. This is a truth. However, it wasn’t long before this mindset became a priority, and I mistakenly turned this skill into a quest for perfection in performance. It should come as no surprise that this quest was not only unattainable, but increasingly problematic for my sense of self-worth.
So many notes… so little time
When my son started to learn the piano around this same time, I hovered a lot, because I also wanted to prevent him from making mistakes – trying to stop him from playing a wrong note right before it happened so that he too would have less to practice, less to fix. Needless to say, we didn’t have a lot of fun during these practice sessions…
Fast-forward to me discovering that mistakes are an important part of learning.
Here is an interesting interview from Bullet Proof Musician’s Noa Kageyama. He is speaking with Robert Duke, who, interestingly, ran the study I had read that gave me the idea to not make any mistakes in sight-reading so that I would need to practice less.
He says:
Mistake-making actually increases your depth of understanding in ways that not making any mistakes would not.
I realized I hadn’t fully understood the purpose of that initial study. And that in fact,
my greatest mistake was actually
TRYING TO BE PERFECT
As artists, we are trying to convey the collective human experience. Which is flawed, not perfect. I’m not saying I began glorifying wrong notes – pretty sure I could never do that. What I am saying is, striving for “optimal” is important in art. Striving for excellence is important in art. Striving for perfection on the other hand shuts us down, leads us to delay presenting our art until it is “ready”, and frankly, does a real number on our self-worth.
I now understand that when I make mistakes, even in performance, it is the process of turning my attention and intention towards problem solving that allows me to come up with creative, artistic responses to those challenges. When I relearn and re-practice those sections, I retrain my brain and also refine my interpretation in a way that is entirely unique to me. And it is this unique intention that creates a powerful and distinctive artistic interpretation.
I’m not finished the book my sister gifted me yet. But even if I haven’t completed all the assignments correctly, I’ve learned a lot. And in my daily practice of working through its assignments, I may even grow to love this book that I’ve so far loved to hate.
