A practice is learning by doing

Practice (and only practice) makes perfect.

A practice is the disciplined (not just motivated) repetition (recursion) of what you know (superficial, incomplete knowledge) with enough experimentation (at least some actual experience) in that repetition to unlock those things you don’t yet know (or able to perform).

This is a universal description – it applies for sports, craftsmanship, performing of music, writing – any kind of habitual activity, including introspection, self-control and so called “emotional intelligence”.

It matches perfectly with the principles from “The Beginners Mind” book, which is key to everything.

Archery is a signed out deliberate practice which illustrates all other practices, or one’s whole life as practice of virtue (seeing thing as they are and doing the right thing).

It is ever-accumulating (a matching “deep-structure”, neuro-plasticity), and never-ending. It is sometimes painful, but that is the way (just like sports).

Life is shaped by our mind, we become what we think. The practices of your life are your life. They define the path you follow, they are how (the means) you become what you want to become (the ends), they make you who you are (self-identification).

In this way everything you do is always building your skill set (neuro-maturation). You’re always expanding your practice (not just a metaphor).

The practice also informs the experimentation (trial and error) that expands it. The more you know (What Is) the more you “see” (understand).

The trick is to follow your curiosity and to trick oneself into moderate and controlled passion and attachment (self-identification with what you do). It is just dopamine releases, after all.

You are less reliant on others and you free up resources (and time - changing oneself takes a long time) to focus (not just by strict self-discipline, but by indifference to everything social) on life’s more interesting things.

This is the way. Follow it. Follow it knowing you will likely fail (the first 10,000 photos), knowing that you’re probably doing it the wrong way (any sports, artistic performances), but you’re going to try it anyway… (to build appropriate structures in your brain) you’d be surprised what works (only by doing).

Going into yet unknown, but managing the risks (lowest costs, quickest backtracking and affordable restarts - there will be a lot of restarts) requires a systematic exploration process – a well-understood A* search.

Pick things to experiment on and situations to experiment in where you can keep the risk level low (stop-loses, knowing when to stop, backtrack and reatart).

Whatever the case, learn to manage risk so that your lessons learned aren’t so painful — financially, emotionally, physically —- that you forget (brain structures won’t be “updated” in a deep sleep) what you learned and remember only the trauma of the (pain of) learning (making inevitable mistakes).

Adapted from this blog post https://luxagraf.net/essay/everything-is-a-practice