PRACTICE DOES NOT MAKE PERFECT!

This ancient cliché tells you “Practice makes perfect” but if you look at it logically it doesn’t. Yes it doesn’t... I have always heard my teachers at various points in my life tell me that practicing a particular art would make me perfect in it... Hey! sometimes we got to question rigid clichés and that’s what I just want to do and I just did.

I learnt to drive a manual automobile, I mean a car, at 17. Someone may say I have perfected it but do we actually get perfect?
I see a public transport driver who tells me he’s been driving for 25years and my brain tells me “wow! You’re looking at a perfect driver.”

Hey! If he is perfect, what happened last week when he lost control of the car and hit a tree? You may tell me  “No… accidents happen, and there are a few external factors that could be the cause.” but the fact remains, the car doesn’t control itself, the driver does and most importantly, it’s an accident, also known as a Mistake... And a Mistake is an attribute of imperfection.

Who ever says Practice makes perfect? When another cliché says “Nobody is Perfect”. And if nobody is perfect how come the solution to imperfection is Practice? Do you get my perspective at all?

Practice doesn’t make you generally perfect neither does it make you perfect in that one area, it only improves you in that area, makes you efficient so you do better but that doesn’t eliminate the probability of a mistake even though it’s a minuit mistake. A mistake is a mistake and a sign of imperfections.

If practice makes perfect, why do you still make mistakes when you write or scribble on a note? Remember if you are 30 by now that means you’ve been writing for over 25 years if you started scribbling at age 3 or 5. Yet you still make mistakes when you type or write, not because you don’t know how to write or because you don’t know what you’re doing but because that’s a reminder that you are imperfect, we are imperfect.

So what does Practice do? You should know by now; It makes you Efficient, it improves you on that stuff you’ve been practicing on, like if you’ve been learning your math often, you get efficiency solving that area of maths, now when given another area how well or ‘perfect’ you do has a lot to do with your fluid intelligence, your ability to take the knowledge you learned from a previous maths problem to solving the next math problem.

So, next time you quote the cliché, change it, say it this way “Practice makes Efficient.”