Chang precisely recommends the same thing: don't just practice by going through pieces from beginning to end repeatedly. Being a scientist, he quantifies that with efficiency arguments, which are along these lines: if a five minute piece contains two-bar difficult passage, then you can only practice that passage twelve times in the span of one hour. If the passage is only ten seconds long, you can practice it twelve times in just two minutes, which is 30 times more efficient.
One tools is to use a metronome to find the stress passages in a piece. Without a metronome, we hide the stressful passages by slowing down subconsciously.
Set the metronome at a baseline rate at which you can play everything. Then gradually crank up the speed. Then the stress points show up: passages where you fumble.
Chang makes astonishingly clever observations about speed. Basically, speed has two extremes that are easy: very slow, or super fast. It's just as hard to slow down from high speed playing as it is to speed up slow playing. The initial argument he makes is that there is no faster way to play three notes than to just hit a three note chord with three fingers, which is easy, and "infinitely fast". Moreover, it is basically easy to slow down from that "infinite speed" a little bit; if we hit the chord so that the fingers are staggered slightly, we will play a fast arpeggio. A really fast run of notes is like that: hitting groups of notes in this manner, and changing the hand position in between those groups.
One tools is to use a metronome to find the stress passages in a piece. Without a metronome, we hide the stressful passages by slowing down subconsciously.
It's striking how one's self-perception can be faulty this way. I've had this sort of thing pointed out to me by a bandmate, years ago, using a tape recorder and a metronome. It's like I was in a Sci-fi time-distortion, not because the tempo change was that large, but because it was so invisible to me without the recording and metronome!
My guitar professor in college would have me pick up from random points in a piece of music at speed.
Another reply on this thread suggested that practicing slow is categorically bad. This isn't true. There is value in not locking in bad habits by being deliberate at low speed.
I had never heard this about playing fast, though. Subjective as it may be, I always abhorred the "shredding" set, because it felt like a cheap trick rather than skillful playing.
Hah, that is an excellent book. I remember it pissed off one of my friends who claimed that slow practice is the best way to learn. Glad I didn't listen to him, I use these techniques when learning all kinds of stuff.
Guitar virtuoso Shawn Lane offers another approach, where you attempt to learn very difficult passages by jumping right into it at the correct speed.
The idea here is that, by slowly speeding up, you end up using low-speed mechanics on high-speed passages and it doesn't always work. It's not for the faint of heart, but if you find yourself struggling it's certainly worth trying.
> If the passage is only ten seconds long, you can practice it twelve times in just two minutes, which is 30 times more efficient.
Your example timing makes me suspicious that this is a theory you haven't actually tried to put into practice yet.
Ten seconds is an eternity for a drill of a difficult passage. For an amateur, that's almost guaranteed to be too much music for them to isolate the difficulty. That means instead of a success rate of 100% on the drill they'll get something considerably less. For an amateur, "difficulty" usually means they were already playing it wrong before they began drilling it. So any mistakes in the drill help reinforce the initial muscle memory for that passage. That makes it extremely likely that they'll repeat the same mistake when you add an audience and nerves.
Drilling passages that are too long does at least decrease the chance of the player losing their place-- they have practiced starting at various spots that aren't simply the beginning. But they are only "30 times more efficient" at playing the piece with an unnecessarily high error rate.
My experience is that the choice isn't "playing for fun" vs "deliberate practice" it's "playing for fun" vs "not playing". If practice is fun, I'll do a lot of it and get better. It's not especially efficient practice per hour, but since I do a lot of it it helps a lot. If practice is not fun I just don't play, and I don't get better.
The advice in the article is probably right for people who want to be the very best, but probably wrong for most people who might read it.
> If practice is not fun I just don't play, and I don't get better.
But what if your goal is to be one of the greatest pianist alive? Then we have to dissect what is "not fun". There are moments of neutral practice, or "monotony", which is what I think the article touches on. The idea that sometimes, practice can feel more like a chore than a pleasure. The article speaks about in this context, you have to push through the negative (or apathy) to continue practicing.
Last year, I had the privilege to attend a seminar in Aikido where two individuals were awarded the rank of godan (5th degree black belt). In our organization, the minimal amount of time required to be eligible for the rank is just over 18 years (and the requirements are increasing next year). One of the individuals spoke about how Aikido and training was much like a marriage - sometimes you enjoy coming to class, sometimes you hate it, and sometimes it's neither feeling; however, much like a marriage, good times or bad, you have to continue working on it.
I've spoken on here before as well about the element of discipline/perseverance/grit in terms of improving oneself. Angela Duckworth has studied the effects of grit across multiple fields, one in particular was grit in cadets at West Point. Higher levels of grit were more likely to complete the program and good leaders were more likely to have higher grit scores.
"Fun" is still a loose, ill-defined term. You can have fun being pursuing a task for leisure or for mastery.
I think you may be forgetting point in your history where you needed deliberate practice to get to where you are now. If you only ever choose between not playing and playing for fun, you will never get better. The transition to playing only for fun is the point where improving is now left to chance—not that you completely stop growing, but you become more entrenched in your existing practices and your skills crystallize at their current level.
I am way better at practicing things I wanna do. I stink at learning shit I am not enthused about. Here's a thought I had earlier today...
I hate going to the gym. I just don't like it, and that makes it hard to get good at it. I can make myself go, that lasts 1 to 3 months, I eventually hurt myself because I was to cheap to invest the resources necessary to learn proper form, I take a couple weeks off, lose all my progress, and get stuck on the fact that the same cycle is gonna have the same outcome, and I just stop going.
I love going to handstand classes. I see the same small group of people most classes, I know most of them by name, and for some reason I like working towards handstands. It have been taking these classes for 6 months, and my progress is slow for reasons (discipline, bi-lateral radial head replacement, weak starting point), but I love going. I spend the time necessary to learn the body awareness I need, and I get private lessons when I get stuck on learning something harder.
I highly recommend not bothering with exercise choices you think you have to do, and seeking those you wanna do.
if the practice is not fun, in the sense that it’s compelling like a great book or a great game or a great conversation, then 1. it isn’t effective practice 2. you wont want to do it- great practice is for everyone
“I, and the other strong students in my department, did practice less than the weaker students,” he said.
This is quite misleading. -Locally-, it might be true that weaker students practice more than strong students, to compensate for their weakness. But on average, great piano players practice much more than mediocre piano players.
It's easy to find examples, but I'll name two that I found in my first two Google searches:
Lang Lang (virtuoso classical pianist) - 6 hours a day
Oscar Peterson (virtuoso jazz pianists) - 6 hours a day
I'm --certain-- this is the norm, not the exception.
Agreed. I simply do not believe they practiced less.
I know a couple technical folks who are smoking good at their instruments, and basically said:
"Look, I spent time in <strong musical program> as an undergraduate. One group "has it"--they're the elite. I'm in the second group. I'm practicing my ass off, and I'm not deaf. I'm gaining some ground on the best in the second group, but it's REALLY slow as they're practicing their ass off, too. Maybe I can reach the bottom of the elite group after 4 years. Maybe."
"Or I can get a CS degree. And still play my instrument. And get amazing gigs simply because I am more than good enough and am always available when a cool gig comes up since I don't have to worry about money."
Sviatoslav Richter has some amusing comments on this, even though he did not intend to be amusing. He states in his notebooks that he never practiced more than three hours a day and that he kept accurate records of his practicing, which clearly demonstrated this. He then added that (of course) travel days in which you don't have access to a piano, sick days, etc. all need to be made up for. So, while he practiced more than three hours, on average it was not more than that.
There then appears a footnote in the notebooks by the editor stating that even with this correction, his friends', colleagues', and the editor's own experience of Richter suggest he practiced way more than that.
Indeed, Al DiMeola is another example. I used to do 6 hour practice sessions with some regularity. What you practice during that 6 hour session matters, however. If you "play" for 6 hours, you can't call it practice. They're quite different.
6 hours a day is plenty for a professional working musician, since they’re going to be performing, dealing with students etc. Serious students will do up to 10 hours a day tho.
I don't know if I would say "avoid flow" but "working on what does not come easy" is definitely a thing I found important in my journey from "kid who likes to draw" to "ex-animator". Whenever someone asks for advice on breaking art block one of my suggestions is to go draw something they hate to draw.
This attitude became ingrained enough that when I was taking pole dance class later in life, my instructor noticed that, unlike most beginners faced with a new move they were having difficulty with, I'd make myself spend time experimenting with it instead of falling back to refining earlier basics I was more than good enough for at that stage of my practice. It's a good one to have, IMHO.
And I sure as hell have found ways to complicate my work as time goes on. Constantly doing stuff I can knock out in my sleep gets boring; challenge is fun.
Good advice for getting better at playing classical piano. The kind of practice described in the post is really good for honing precise technique. I question the extent to which it's applicable to creative work generally, as the post claims.
The kind of piano playing described in the post doesn't actually leave much room for creativity. You're playing someone else's music. You have a bit of freedom to vary emphasis and tempo, but good luck winning competitions while getting creative with your own melody, harmony, etc. If we treated painting the way we treat classical music, we'd have competitions to see who's the best at paint-by-numbers.
If you want to become a better writer, composer, painter, programmer, etc., technique is relevant but not the same thing as getting more creative.
Doesn't every creative endeavor require some technical proficiency? This advice is about how to most efficiently acquire that proficiency. Until you do that your creativity will be constrained. As Clark Terry said: "Imitate, assimilate, and innovate."
I agree with this view. Technical precision only goes so far, and it's very easy to tell the difference between a performance that is technically precise but essentially lifeless, versus one that is also technically "precise enough" but "works."
It's specifically about practicing/drilling. Which is definitely important to musicianship. The article doesn't even suggest musicians ought not to enter a "flow" state when performing.
I'm not sure how important it is to programming. While I know some younger coders who "practice" and "drill" programming problems, this is pretty foreign to how I've learned to program (over a couple plus decades). I've just... programmed. No shade, whatever works. But as a kind of aside, I'm curious how many programmer readers of HN do "practices" or "drills" of programming (and what stage of your career you are at; even the most expert musicians have to keep practicing and drilling. I think expert programmers just... produce programs).
(But I did find this article enlightening and I predict useful to my amateur musicianship! It's not a bad article at all. I'm just not sure how applicable it is to computer programming -- which it does not claim to be, but I assume is why it was posted on HN -- I think they are very different skills and practices. The muscle memory/physicality aspect of musicianship just doesn't apply to programming I think).
the author invented a definition of "flow" which is different from another common definition which roughly means "getting in the zone" and the result is dangerously clickbaity imo
i do my best work when i'm in the zone and it has nothing to do with whether the work itself is challenging or not. in fact, the more challenging something is, the easier it is for me to stay focused if i feel like i'm making progress
As a distinctly mediocre, lazy and easily bored amateur pianist, I've found that selecting the right pieces for building up technique makes all the difference. I only play for my own enjoyment, not to perform a specific repertoire to a concert standard, so I cannot bring myself to practice scales, arpeggios, Hanon/Czerny and the rest. The best suggestion I've ever found is just playing the Chopin etudes (and the Godowsky transcriptions of them, if you can). They are just the right balance of being of immense technical value while still being musically interesting, lovely to listen to and cover almost the entire range of piano technique that exists. Furthermore, each etude is targeted at a particular aspect of technique, so it is easy to pick something that suits your particular needs. For instance, I'm learning op. 10 no. 4 right now [1] in order to strengthen my left hand and improve wrist flexibility at speed (the curse of small hands), and the improvement is palpable, even with very limited practice time.
The other thing I would say is that it really helps to have a goal to drive you. I quit playing piano for a decade and the only reason I came back to it, built up what little technique I had and persevered was because I really, really wanted to play a particular prelude by Rachmaninov, even though it was way out of my reach at the time. Finally learning it after a year or two of fairly hard work was very rewarding.
As a (jazz) piano student myself, I am happy to see "To Master a Skill, Master Something Harder."
Pianist and YouTuber Nahre Sol has a great set of exercises based on modifying passages of Chopin etudes, which serve as excellent material to study both as a template and in their own right. [1][2] She varies harmony and rhythm, and takes the exercise through all 12-keys. Much harder than just learning the passage in the original key, but that's the whole point.
Anyone apply deliberate practice to software development? I would be interested to hear applications.
I can imagine data structures and algorithms and coding competitions, but I've always struggled with the concept of drills for improving skills as a software developer.
Old time programmers often wrote everything down before inputting it and engaged with their code instead of with tests and the debugger. Not to say tests and the debugger don't have their place. Here's the handwritten sheets for the Algol 58 compiler that Don Knuth wrote in assembly for the Burroughs 205.
He's famous as a programmer who got things right the first time. And that's been consistent over his career. A lot of what's in there is obsolete, but notice that even in 1960 he was doing something on paper like the literate programming that he developed later.
Every time I hear a concept I don't know I make a flashcard and quiz myself daily. I also have a collection of problems to keep myself challenged, some are interview questions and others are common patterns.
Whenever I code something moderately challenging, I come back and do it again, and maybe again until it’s good and proper. I love history rewrite in mercurial.
The code gets better, but the business outcome remains unchanged so it may look like waste. But it’s not waste - the micro skills acquired in the exercise accumulate.
I think I've gradually developed something like deliberate practice as I go along, in that I increasingly approach greenfielding with an "idiomatic muscle memory solution" like "write approximately this style of loop", or "make approximately this data structure", and then start adjusting the outcome of that to fit the true nature of the problem, because that gets me through at least two iterations, while if I just sit at a blank page thinking, I produce code that is usually not really better and still needs adjustment. For some things architecture planning does help, but a great deal of it can be written as a pseudocode comment where i list the idioms i plan to use to address the problem. Often I do that, spot the flaws, and get in another iteration that way without having to go to the compiler. When I'm really stuck I go back to basic philosophy-of-truth reasoning and look for "a set of ideas that are coherent with each other" - one idea being the problem being solved, and the remainder being techniques to apply. Often this process reveals a need for research into unknowns, and hence another source of iterative feedback.
And so if I were to codify all the types of common idioms as if they were scales - which I haven't done - I would be able to drill those, but I suspect that there's a lot of them that are different between different domains of programming, and that's a major source of expertise.
Likewise my approach to naming has seen some iterative improvement, and it's definitely a thing I am training as I go. Names are like comments: you don't really want too many of them in your program, because they can obscure other information. Standardized variable names are great, and dense code is great when you can get it without sacrificing much readibility. I spent a little while evaluating what length of variable is sufficient to avoid collision and maintain readability while getting good density where needed:
1 letter - fine for local variables using detailed mathematics, where each variable is necessarily used in a dense, non-obvious way and it would be reasonable to have an explainer comment.
2 letters - hard to use well. As abbreviations they tend to collide too often to be recommended, and they are hard to recognize.
3 letters - a sweet spot for density and low collision rates, but still often unreadable.
4 letters - sufficient for most abbreviations and many full words.
5+ letters - at this point a majority of single words you would use will fit, and so you may as well consider this as "I am spelling out a whole word", with the next step up being multiple words and phrases, and at that point code density is the main tradeoff being made.
A common naming idiom I practice is labelling array-like values such as min/max bounds numerically, e.g. an axis-aligned box defined with x0, x1, y0, y1. For a while I used "result" as the variable for all returned values, after seeing this idiom in Pascal. Then I realized that I could use "ans" (answer) instead and get much denser code in a lot of instances. It's little things like that, which add up to a pleasant, lower-friction experience.
Interesting, that with the original title, "Flow Is the Opiate of the Mediocre: Advice on Getting Better" the discussion centered more around people getting defensive about Flow.
For anyone who wants to get a more in depth look at how to improve at something by one of the leading researchers in the field, check out the book Peak. Anytime I read an article like this or anything on how to improve, the concepts are explained in depth in the book.
This shows that by using cherry-picked examples, you can prove anything.
Elite musicians are all super relaxed and chill? Some are, some aren't. For every story of a relaxed musician, I can find you a super successful one that would literally run from gig to gig on weekends. If you're willing to ignore all evidence to the contrary and willing to use a single study to confirm what you already believe, I guess life becomes a lot simpler. Probably helps sell more of them books, too.
Working on your weaknesses can be good if that's something you've avoided doing and doing so would help you advance your skills. What a weird, confrontational way Cal Newport has of getting a reasonable idea across.
It's one of the infinite number of things that are neither necessary nor sufficient to create "success" or be "elite", because those are largely in your own mind and based on how you feel about what's happened rather than what has happened.
> This shows that with using unrepresentative, hand-picked examples, you can prove anything.
True, but the pianist in the article still makes good points.
> "The mistake most weak pianists make is playing, not practicing." as I understand it, means that the pianist found repeated confrontation with difficult parts was beneficial versus sessions repeating the music in full from beginning to end.
What he says is about seeking mastery first. To be a great musician, first you need to have taste, that cannot be downplayed. If you have the right taste and an idea of what the music should sound like, then there are mostly technical traps you need to tackle to achieve a great performance. The pianist doesn't mean to say that once you have done the hard parts you shouldn't enjoy playing the music in full—that's would be stupid. No great performer ever stops in the mid of a piece and get along with it being great.
But it is much easier to find "flow" or whatever you call it, once you have mastery. And one is not exclusive of the other, that's maybe Cal Newport's interpretation or simplification to match the goal of his article.
> "Weak pianists make music a reactive task, not a creative task."
and
> "In performance, weak pianists try to reactively move away from mistakes, while strong pianists move towards a perfect mental image."
The first strategy I completely agree with. Growth happens outside of your comfort zone.
The second and third strategies I don't completely relate to. If it works for you, great.
The fourth I would somewhat disagree with. You need to know where you're going before you start playing but "moving towards a perfect mental image" is just silly. Is this piano player trying to be a robot? There are countless ways to play certain pieces and a lot of the time it depends how you're feeling that day. Play like a human being. This quote by Beethoven is apt, "To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable." I would say the most important thing is to play with passion and to try to stay true to the spirit of the piece you're playing.
Source: my personal opinions after playing classical piano for 14 years.
I've known /met a lot of serious students, some from living next door to Manhattan School of Music, and they all had different advice on practicing. Some had very structured allocations of time, recording all practices and journaling their progress, some said they put their entire being into practicing one tune at a time.
I recommend reading Kenny Werner's Effortless Mastery, which is probably in your public library if you're in a big city, and also the interviews in Wernick/Trischka's Masters of 5 String Banjo, currently going fore absurd asking prices on Amazon and hard to find unless you know a banjo player.
I like this article for what to do in the moments of practice, but for a more complete plan this post that was nested in the OP is pretty important in describing how often and in what manner you should do this.
Interesting perspective. The author's basic point is that you should, to quote the article, "Avoid Flow. Do What Does Not Come Easy". This is in the context of playing piano, so it might be a pitfall there. In my experience though, "doing what does come easy" is a reasonably foolproof and enjoyable way to enter flow; but you can still maintain that state subsequently while meaningfully challenging yourself. Your mileage may vary!
I assumed this was going to be about avoiding flow while doing actual work, but this is only in the context of practice and training.
I can see the argument for avoiding flow and focusing on your weaknesses when your goal is self-improvement (and to take the jump from there that it's important to set aside some time to focus on self-improvement), but that doesn't apply when your goal is actual output, which is the majority of the time when it comes to most of our jobs
This was a really interesting read, though I would interpret its message more as 'avoid flow during practice and work on the hard things, so during your performance you can focus on your vision instead of constantly thinking about avoiding mistakes.'
It's an interesting counterargument to the 'train how you perform' philosophy.
[+] [-] kazinator|6 years ago|reply
https://fundamentals-of-piano-practice.readthedocs.io/en/lat...
Chang precisely recommends the same thing: don't just practice by going through pieces from beginning to end repeatedly. Being a scientist, he quantifies that with efficiency arguments, which are along these lines: if a five minute piece contains two-bar difficult passage, then you can only practice that passage twelve times in the span of one hour. If the passage is only ten seconds long, you can practice it twelve times in just two minutes, which is 30 times more efficient.
One tools is to use a metronome to find the stress passages in a piece. Without a metronome, we hide the stressful passages by slowing down subconsciously.
Set the metronome at a baseline rate at which you can play everything. Then gradually crank up the speed. Then the stress points show up: passages where you fumble.
Chang makes astonishingly clever observations about speed. Basically, speed has two extremes that are easy: very slow, or super fast. It's just as hard to slow down from high speed playing as it is to speed up slow playing. The initial argument he makes is that there is no faster way to play three notes than to just hit a three note chord with three fingers, which is easy, and "infinitely fast". Moreover, it is basically easy to slow down from that "infinite speed" a little bit; if we hit the chord so that the fingers are staggered slightly, we will play a fast arpeggio. A really fast run of notes is like that: hitting groups of notes in this manner, and changing the hand position in between those groups.
[+] [-] stcredzero|6 years ago|reply
It's striking how one's self-perception can be faulty this way. I've had this sort of thing pointed out to me by a bandmate, years ago, using a tape recorder and a metronome. It's like I was in a Sci-fi time-distortion, not because the tempo change was that large, but because it was so invisible to me without the recording and metronome!
[+] [-] devin|6 years ago|reply
Another reply on this thread suggested that practicing slow is categorically bad. This isn't true. There is value in not locking in bad habits by being deliberate at low speed.
I had never heard this about playing fast, though. Subjective as it may be, I always abhorred the "shredding" set, because it felt like a cheap trick rather than skillful playing.
[+] [-] Pimpus|6 years ago|reply
Glenn Gould practiced by playing fast: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qB76jxBq_gQ
[+] [-] graeme|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huehehue|6 years ago|reply
The idea here is that, by slowly speeding up, you end up using low-speed mechanics on high-speed passages and it doesn't always work. It's not for the faint of heart, but if you find yourself struggling it's certainly worth trying.
[+] [-] vanous|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jancsika|6 years ago|reply
Your example timing makes me suspicious that this is a theory you haven't actually tried to put into practice yet.
Ten seconds is an eternity for a drill of a difficult passage. For an amateur, that's almost guaranteed to be too much music for them to isolate the difficulty. That means instead of a success rate of 100% on the drill they'll get something considerably less. For an amateur, "difficulty" usually means they were already playing it wrong before they began drilling it. So any mistakes in the drill help reinforce the initial muscle memory for that passage. That makes it extremely likely that they'll repeat the same mistake when you add an audience and nerves.
Drilling passages that are too long does at least decrease the chance of the player losing their place-- they have practiced starting at various spots that aren't simply the beginning. But they are only "30 times more efficient" at playing the piece with an unnecessarily high error rate.
[+] [-] john61|6 years ago|reply
Therefore a chord or arpeggio is not a fast scale. He is comparing apples and oranges.
[+] [-] LeicaLatte|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] relativeadv|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jefftk|6 years ago|reply
The advice in the article is probably right for people who want to be the very best, but probably wrong for most people who might read it.
[+] [-] tsumnia|6 years ago|reply
But what if your goal is to be one of the greatest pianist alive? Then we have to dissect what is "not fun". There are moments of neutral practice, or "monotony", which is what I think the article touches on. The idea that sometimes, practice can feel more like a chore than a pleasure. The article speaks about in this context, you have to push through the negative (or apathy) to continue practicing.
Last year, I had the privilege to attend a seminar in Aikido where two individuals were awarded the rank of godan (5th degree black belt). In our organization, the minimal amount of time required to be eligible for the rank is just over 18 years (and the requirements are increasing next year). One of the individuals spoke about how Aikido and training was much like a marriage - sometimes you enjoy coming to class, sometimes you hate it, and sometimes it's neither feeling; however, much like a marriage, good times or bad, you have to continue working on it.
I've spoken on here before as well about the element of discipline/perseverance/grit in terms of improving oneself. Angela Duckworth has studied the effects of grit across multiple fields, one in particular was grit in cadets at West Point. Higher levels of grit were more likely to complete the program and good leaders were more likely to have higher grit scores.
"Fun" is still a loose, ill-defined term. You can have fun being pursuing a task for leisure or for mastery.
[+] [-] klodolph|6 years ago|reply
The saying goes “practice makes permanent”.
[+] [-] PopeDotNinja|6 years ago|reply
I hate going to the gym. I just don't like it, and that makes it hard to get good at it. I can make myself go, that lasts 1 to 3 months, I eventually hurt myself because I was to cheap to invest the resources necessary to learn proper form, I take a couple weeks off, lose all my progress, and get stuck on the fact that the same cycle is gonna have the same outcome, and I just stop going.
I love going to handstand classes. I see the same small group of people most classes, I know most of them by name, and for some reason I like working towards handstands. It have been taking these classes for 6 months, and my progress is slow for reasons (discipline, bi-lateral radial head replacement, weak starting point), but I love going. I spend the time necessary to learn the body awareness I need, and I get private lessons when I get stuck on learning something harder.
I highly recommend not bothering with exercise choices you think you have to do, and seeking those you wanna do.
[+] [-] brooklyn_ashey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ken47|6 years ago|reply
This is quite misleading. -Locally-, it might be true that weaker students practice more than strong students, to compensate for their weakness. But on average, great piano players practice much more than mediocre piano players.
It's easy to find examples, but I'll name two that I found in my first two Google searches:
Lang Lang (virtuoso classical pianist) - 6 hours a day Oscar Peterson (virtuoso jazz pianists) - 6 hours a day
I'm --certain-- this is the norm, not the exception.
[+] [-] bsder|6 years ago|reply
I know a couple technical folks who are smoking good at their instruments, and basically said:
"Look, I spent time in <strong musical program> as an undergraduate. One group "has it"--they're the elite. I'm in the second group. I'm practicing my ass off, and I'm not deaf. I'm gaining some ground on the best in the second group, but it's REALLY slow as they're practicing their ass off, too. Maybe I can reach the bottom of the elite group after 4 years. Maybe."
"Or I can get a CS degree. And still play my instrument. And get amazing gigs simply because I am more than good enough and am always available when a cool gig comes up since I don't have to worry about money."
[+] [-] ternaryoperator|6 years ago|reply
There then appears a footnote in the notebooks by the editor stating that even with this correction, his friends', colleagues', and the editor's own experience of Richter suggest he practiced way more than that.
[+] [-] devin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rukuu001|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egypturnash|6 years ago|reply
This attitude became ingrained enough that when I was taking pole dance class later in life, my instructor noticed that, unlike most beginners faced with a new move they were having difficulty with, I'd make myself spend time experimenting with it instead of falling back to refining earlier basics I was more than good enough for at that stage of my practice. It's a good one to have, IMHO.
And I sure as hell have found ways to complicate my work as time goes on. Constantly doing stuff I can knock out in my sleep gets boring; challenge is fun.
[+] [-] bjt|6 years ago|reply
The kind of piano playing described in the post doesn't actually leave much room for creativity. You're playing someone else's music. You have a bit of freedom to vary emphasis and tempo, but good luck winning competitions while getting creative with your own melody, harmony, etc. If we treated painting the way we treat classical music, we'd have competitions to see who's the best at paint-by-numbers.
If you want to become a better writer, composer, painter, programmer, etc., technique is relevant but not the same thing as getting more creative.
[+] [-] maroonblazer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zebraflask|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrochkind1|6 years ago|reply
I'm not sure how important it is to programming. While I know some younger coders who "practice" and "drill" programming problems, this is pretty foreign to how I've learned to program (over a couple plus decades). I've just... programmed. No shade, whatever works. But as a kind of aside, I'm curious how many programmer readers of HN do "practices" or "drills" of programming (and what stage of your career you are at; even the most expert musicians have to keep practicing and drilling. I think expert programmers just... produce programs).
(But I did find this article enlightening and I predict useful to my amateur musicianship! It's not a bad article at all. I'm just not sure how applicable it is to computer programming -- which it does not claim to be, but I assume is why it was posted on HN -- I think they are very different skills and practices. The muscle memory/physicality aspect of musicianship just doesn't apply to programming I think).
[+] [-] aji|6 years ago|reply
i do my best work when i'm in the zone and it has nothing to do with whether the work itself is challenging or not. in fact, the more challenging something is, the easier it is for me to stay focused if i feel like i'm making progress
[+] [-] keldaris|6 years ago|reply
The other thing I would say is that it really helps to have a goal to drive you. I quit playing piano for a decade and the only reason I came back to it, built up what little technique I had and persevered was because I really, really wanted to play a particular prelude by Rachmaninov, even though it was way out of my reach at the time. Finally learning it after a year or two of fairly hard work was very rewarding.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_eyiPKPO2U
[+] [-] almstimplmntd|6 years ago|reply
Pianist and YouTuber Nahre Sol has a great set of exercises based on modifying passages of Chopin etudes, which serve as excellent material to study both as a template and in their own right. [1][2] She varies harmony and rhythm, and takes the exercise through all 12-keys. Much harder than just learning the passage in the original key, but that's the whole point.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xYfgJVm1Ns [2] https://flatfiv.com/products/piano-technique-intensive
[+] [-] rshudson|6 years ago|reply
I can imagine data structures and algorithms and coding competitions, but I've always struggled with the concept of drills for improving skills as a software developer.
Would love to hear ideas from others.
[+] [-] vajrabum|6 years ago|reply
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Knuth_Don...
He's famous as a programmer who got things right the first time. And that's been consistent over his career. A lot of what's in there is obsolete, but notice that even in 1960 he was doing something on paper like the literate programming that he developed later.
[+] [-] brian_spiering|6 years ago|reply
I improve my typing speed with http://www.speedcoder.net/
Every time I hear a concept I don't know I make a flashcard and quiz myself daily. I also have a collection of problems to keep myself challenged, some are interview questions and others are common patterns.
Here are public decks for Python: • General Python - https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1394656023 • Coding challenges - https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/223286091
[+] [-] wodenokoto|6 years ago|reply
I used to do regex crosswords, which really helped me cement my reading ability of regexes and in term writing ability.
I think programming is closer to writing than playing piano. The types of exercises that writers do to get good are to rewrite, reread and rewrite.
[+] [-] DenisM|6 years ago|reply
The code gets better, but the business outcome remains unchanged so it may look like waste. But it’s not waste - the micro skills acquired in the exercise accumulate.
[+] [-] mntmoss|6 years ago|reply
And so if I were to codify all the types of common idioms as if they were scales - which I haven't done - I would be able to drill those, but I suspect that there's a lot of them that are different between different domains of programming, and that's a major source of expertise.
Likewise my approach to naming has seen some iterative improvement, and it's definitely a thing I am training as I go. Names are like comments: you don't really want too many of them in your program, because they can obscure other information. Standardized variable names are great, and dense code is great when you can get it without sacrificing much readibility. I spent a little while evaluating what length of variable is sufficient to avoid collision and maintain readability while getting good density where needed:
1 letter - fine for local variables using detailed mathematics, where each variable is necessarily used in a dense, non-obvious way and it would be reasonable to have an explainer comment.
2 letters - hard to use well. As abbreviations they tend to collide too often to be recommended, and they are hard to recognize.
3 letters - a sweet spot for density and low collision rates, but still often unreadable.
4 letters - sufficient for most abbreviations and many full words.
5+ letters - at this point a majority of single words you would use will fit, and so you may as well consider this as "I am spelling out a whole word", with the next step up being multiple words and phrases, and at that point code density is the main tradeoff being made.
A common naming idiom I practice is labelling array-like values such as min/max bounds numerically, e.g. an axis-aligned box defined with x0, x1, y0, y1. For a while I used "result" as the variable for all returned values, after seeing this idiom in Pascal. Then I realized that I could use "ans" (answer) instead and get much denser code in a lot of instances. It's little things like that, which add up to a pleasant, lower-friction experience.
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramblerman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HiroshiSan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] henning|6 years ago|reply
Elite musicians are all super relaxed and chill? Some are, some aren't. For every story of a relaxed musician, I can find you a super successful one that would literally run from gig to gig on weekends. If you're willing to ignore all evidence to the contrary and willing to use a single study to confirm what you already believe, I guess life becomes a lot simpler. Probably helps sell more of them books, too.
Working on your weaknesses can be good if that's something you've avoided doing and doing so would help you advance your skills. What a weird, confrontational way Cal Newport has of getting a reasonable idea across.
It's one of the infinite number of things that are neither necessary nor sufficient to create "success" or be "elite", because those are largely in your own mind and based on how you feel about what's happened rather than what has happened.
[+] [-] Hoasi|6 years ago|reply
True, but the pianist in the article still makes good points.
> "The mistake most weak pianists make is playing, not practicing." as I understand it, means that the pianist found repeated confrontation with difficult parts was beneficial versus sessions repeating the music in full from beginning to end.
What he says is about seeking mastery first. To be a great musician, first you need to have taste, that cannot be downplayed. If you have the right taste and an idea of what the music should sound like, then there are mostly technical traps you need to tackle to achieve a great performance. The pianist doesn't mean to say that once you have done the hard parts you shouldn't enjoy playing the music in full—that's would be stupid. No great performer ever stops in the mid of a piece and get along with it being great. But it is much easier to find "flow" or whatever you call it, once you have mastery. And one is not exclusive of the other, that's maybe Cal Newport's interpretation or simplification to match the goal of his article.
> "Weak pianists make music a reactive task, not a creative task."
and
> "In performance, weak pianists try to reactively move away from mistakes, while strong pianists move towards a perfect mental image."
ring particularly true and are useful tips.
[+] [-] president|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tylercubell|6 years ago|reply
The second and third strategies I don't completely relate to. If it works for you, great.
The fourth I would somewhat disagree with. You need to know where you're going before you start playing but "moving towards a perfect mental image" is just silly. Is this piano player trying to be a robot? There are countless ways to play certain pieces and a lot of the time it depends how you're feeling that day. Play like a human being. This quote by Beethoven is apt, "To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable." I would say the most important thing is to play with passion and to try to stay true to the spirit of the piece you're playing.
Source: my personal opinions after playing classical piano for 14 years.
[+] [-] gtani|6 years ago|reply
I recommend reading Kenny Werner's Effortless Mastery, which is probably in your public library if you're in a big city, and also the interviews in Wernick/Trischka's Masters of 5 String Banjo, currently going fore absurd asking prices on Amazon and hard to find unless you know a banjo player.
[+] [-] dizzyfingers|6 years ago|reply
http://www.calnewport.com/blog/2011/11/11/if-youre-busy-your...
[+] [-] 0815test|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jdreyfuss|6 years ago|reply
I can see the argument for avoiding flow and focusing on your weaknesses when your goal is self-improvement (and to take the jump from there that it's important to set aside some time to focus on self-improvement), but that doesn't apply when your goal is actual output, which is the majority of the time when it comes to most of our jobs
[+] [-] epiphanitus|6 years ago|reply
It's an interesting counterargument to the 'train how you perform' philosophy.