How do you practice?

January 27, 2025
6:35 PM

Time and experience don't always translate to mastery. When it comes to refining your skills and improving your performance, it pays more to be intentional about how you can improve rather than pushing yourself to work harder. Practice doesn't make perfect; it makes permanent what you practice. Practicing the wrong things, or even the right things in the wrong way, will only solidify what you need to grow out of.

Take it from my personal experience as a writer. In the writing community, there is a saying that writing is just editing. What takes me an hour to write, sometimes takes me multiple hours to edit. What you may read once, I read dozens of times because that's what it takes to write something worth reading. It's not writing but editing that makes you a good writer.

The truth is, there are always challenges you must learn to overcome if you want to achieve anything for yourself that you may not expect as a consumer. When I first started writing, one of the most discouraging aspects of writing was how poor my writing was. I believed I was a bad writer because I needed to edit my work so many times. However, it has been the very thing that helped me improve and has become a regular part of my writing.

If you have been working at something and haven't seen the results you want, don't give up and reflect on the way you practice. Make some time to consider how you can be more consistent, deliberate, and strategic about what and how you practice. It is a small improvement that can make a big difference over time.

Chris X
7:13 PM

P.S.
In this letter, I have kept 20% of my first draft and thrown out more than 4 times the words I published. It takes time to clarify my thoughts. It's now 1:35 AM the next day when I'm finished editing. Guess which parts are from the original. :)

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