I was told a lie. Growing up my parents, teachers, and coaches all said the same thing, “practice makes perfect.” I would wiz through my scales on the piano as fast as possible. I would train through my wrestling techniques as fast as I could do them while remaining just satisfactory enough that my coach didn’t call for a do-over. This was the wrong way to learn because it’s not the way we perform well.

The saying ‘practice makes perfect’ is incorrect. Perfect practice makes perfect.

It wasn’t until college when a friend teaching me guitar made me go through scales as slow and as loud as I could that I began to understand how to practice and really- how to learn. By going through things slowly and loudly, the mistakes I was making in haste were more pronounced and could be corrected, but I had to retrain my muscle memory. Simply doing something does not make you good at it. Doing something well makes you good at it.

Completing tasks quickly is often viewed as a positive trait, and I won’t disagree with that logic. However, if we don’t slow down enough to look with a technical view at the individual steps in a project, the minute details in a design, or the individual notes in a scale, we could find that the end result is riddled with small mistakes that become much more exaggerated when combined into a whole. It won’t take long for these little, rushed oversights to become habitual, and correcting bad habits is a much lengthier and more difficult process than taking the time to learn and create correctly in the first place.

It is natural to feel the need to rush through the learning process to obtain the job quicker, feel more prepared through repetition, or impress someone with our speed. Just don’t forget to take some time and make sure what you are drilling into your mind is actually correct. Speed is important, but speed without accuracy is pointless.