For many, the name Vince Lombardi (1913-1970) brings to mind the very successful coach of the NFL Green Bay Packers – whose tenure with the Packers included wins in the first two Super Bowl games – 1966 and 1967.  Lombardi is also well remembered for saying “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”  As I have studied for this series of posts I also have discovered that he apparently frequently remarked “Practice does not make perfect.  Only perfect practice makes perfect.”

In my reading and preparation I also discovered the following which reminded me of my earlier years as a student of the piano – from an article by Annie Murphy Paul:

In an article titled “It’s Not How Much: It’s How,” published in the Journal of Research in Music Education in 2009, University of Texas-Austin professor Robert Duke and his colleagues videotaped advanced piano students as they practiced a difficult passage from a Shostakovich concerto, then ranked the participants by the quality of their ultimate performance.  The researchers found no relationship between excellence of performance and how many times the students had practiced the piece or how long they spent practicing.  Rather, “the most notable differences between the practice sessions of the top-ranked pianists and the remaining participants,” Duke and his coauthors wrote, “are related to their handling of errors.”

The best pianists, they determined, addressed their mistakes immediately.  They identified the precise location and source of each error, then rehearsed that part again and again until it was corrected.  Only then would the best students proceed to the rest of the piece.  “It was not the case that the top-ranked pianists made fewer errors at the beginning of their practice sessions than did the other pianists,” Duke notes.  “But, when errors occurred, the top-ranked pianists seemed much better able to correct them in ways that precluded their recurrence.”

Without deliberate practice, even the most talented individuals will reach a plateau and stay there.  For most of us, that’s just fine.  But don’t delude yourself that you’ll see much improvement unless you’re ready to tackle your mistakes as well as your successes. http://ideas.time.com/2012/01/25/the-myth-of-practice-makes-perfect/

This reminded me again of one very important element of my mother’s insistence on my beginning my piano practice each day by participating in the practice of sight reading.  The practice I was doing was much more important than I ever could have imagined at the time – a practice done by many before me – and – thanks to my mother, the practice was done in a manner that led to regular and constant improvement in my craft and my training.

I strongly believe that this concept is very important and it will be the springboard for coming posts as we continue to move toward understanding how we learn – it is much more than repetition and it is much more than memorization of cognitive facts and information.

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