Practice Makes Perfect: Why and How You Should Prepare for the Right Opportunities

“If you don’t look back at yourself and think: Wow, how stupid I was a year ago, then you must not have learned much in the last year.” — Adam Grant

Admitting that I have been wrong is nothing new. On several occasions, I have had to abandon several preconceived notions after coming to terms with the reality that they either didn’t make much sense or were no longer true. One of those instances wasn’t too long ago when I thought that being good at something was a natural ability, that is; you had to be naturally good at something or not.

But after considering the life stories of some of the most successful sportspersons I follow, I came to realize how wrong I was on this. I quickly understood that their success was not so much based on their talent or ability alone.

Regardless of their naturally given talents or abilities, most professional athletes still need to invest countless hours to practice.

The reality is; whether talented or not, their success or failure can also be attributed to being a function of their mindset, attitude and how much effort they devote to practising.

My Practice Experiment and Why I Think You Should Consider It Too.

“Practice isn’t the thing you do once you are good, it is the thing you do that makes you good” — Malcolm Gladwell

Writing about this subject reminded me of a particular experience some years ago when I was an intern in an advertising agency. On weekends, I would spend several hours practising what I was learning during the week: how to build landing pages and set up advertising campaigns. On most of those weekends, it was really a struggle to set up the ad campaigns on my own or make things work on the web pages I was privately building, but as I continued to try, practise and make mistakes along the way, I got better.

By the time I was given my first opportunity at work to independently set up a campaign for a client, I was more confident to take up the responsibility and easily delivered on the task — because I had practised so much while trying it out over and over again on the weekends. As you might rightly guess, it wasn’t that the task of setting up my first ad campaign for a client was supposed to be really easy, but because I had already spent countless hours privately, trying, failing and learning before the opportunity arrived, it felt so.

What people see and appreciate is the finished product, not the failed experiments or the losses incurred in private during the process that led to the finished product.

And while the internship at the advertising agency provided me with the required environment to experiment with the knowledge I had gained— at that point in time, the end goal wasn’t just to learn something new but to become good at it. This is where the extra effort devoted to practising becomes crucial.

You learn to drive by driving. You learn to surf by surfing. Now imagine your driving instructor doesn’t drive, and learnt to drive from a book — David O

On a final note, I have to admit that there are no guarantees that the time and resources you invest in practising will always be worth it. Nevertheless, I am still convinced that it is a good investment to make in the long run. This, I believe to be true taking into account my personal experience and those of a host of others I have been fortunate to interact with over the last couple of years.

When and if we make the right investment in ourselves, the system will always reward us.

As Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said; “ It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something”. Above all practice!