Does Practice Make Perfect?

A man most people know for his incredible but challenging basketball career, Michael Jordan, once said when giving tips on how to be successful like himself, “You can practice shooting eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong, then all you become is very good at shooting the wrong way. Get the fundamentals down and the levels of everything you do will rise. I’m not out there sweating for three hours every day just to find out what it feels like to sweat.” Although some may disagree and say that quality practices do not go hand in hand with quantity practice for successful people, I disagree. Successful people practice with a purpose: to be successful. Bill Gates had intentions of becoming successful when spending endless hours in the computer lab. The Beatles always had it in their plans to become better each performance when they would play eight hours a day in Germany. Based on evidence, it seems to be a pattern that a successful individual does have both a practice of quality and quantity in their vocabulary to mean the same thing. These individuals have therefore taught themselves hard work, because this idea of 10,000 hours of practice has allowed them to learn how to work for what they

Author Ralph Waldo Emerson once sad " Unless you try something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow". On past experiences in my life I would agree with Emerson because one will never truly master something but people everyday have said people have mastered a sport or a instrument but everyday that person practices on that one thing all the time. Look at some great sports players like Messi or Stephen Curry both are spectacular at what they do. Messi was looked at by many people when he was young at not able to play due to how short and small he was. He started to practice on end to help him get to a point where a small soccer team picked him up and play for them at this point he wasn't done so he got even better and now competes with some of the other worlds best

Perfecting a certain skill can take a very long time and a lot of hard work.

Repetition of a particular skill enables a worker to become more competent in [performance, and eliminates poor practice.

Practice can be the key to improving. In every area of education, in every sport, with every musical activity, anything that requires a good performance, those who practice tend to understand the material more. Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers states just how important this can be. Going off of the idea that “practice makes perfect”, his entire second chapter is dedicated to persuading his audience to believe 10,000 hours is what it takes to succeed. Examples Gladwell provides include how Mozart didn’t create his greatest works until later in his life after he had gained experience, how the Beatles performed in multiple practice concerts in Hamburg, Germany before becoming musical sensations, and how Bobby Fischer and chess grandmasters

According to Dr. Rita Smilkstein’s research into learning, the Natural Human Learning Process explains how the brain develops when someone learns. The first step is motivation to learn a new skill. People get motivated when something becomes a necessity or seems fun to them. Then the second step is the beginning practice. The beginning practice is when someone uses hands on experience and uses trial and error with the skill they are motivated to learn. The third step, she calls the advanced practice stage. In this stage the learner gains control through repetition and continuing practice learning the skill. The fourth step is skillfulness. The learner becomes more successful due to practice and gets positive reinforcement from their results. The fifth step is the refinement stage. This is when the skill becomes second nature and the person can learn new methods. The sixths and final step is mastery. This is when you can teach your skill you learned to someone else

According to, some recent studies, practice is the body through which genius is conveyed. Malcolm Gladwell brought the idea that 10,000 hours of practice was the exact amount of practice needed to acheive excellence, no matter the natural abilty of the person. Through dedication and practice, he stated in his work “The Outliers,” that any person could develop skills that are on par with a professional.

According to the textbook, “skill learning takes place through a predictable and consistent sequence. It is also similar to that of growth and development by how the rate of learning a skill is different across people and depends on a person’s environment as well as their previous experiences” (Hastie, 2012).

These studies show that focused practice leads to significant improvement over a shorter timeframe and that skills are transferrable to the operating theatre.

For example, in order for me to learn how to do injections, or draw blood I’d have to practice in a clinic. Doing these tasks correctly means asking others for help when needed, setting a goal, and planning out the strategy to learning it, monitoring my progress, and getting feedback from others about my performance. The best way deliberate practice can help me fully learn these new skills is by practicing them repetitively. You know the saying “practice makes perfect?” You can’t learn how to do billing, or how to administer injections overnight. It takes time, and effort to learn something new. Paying attention to what you’re doing is very important as well.

The No Child Left Behind and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act entail that students with disabilities or special needs to be open to the overall education and determine the progress of the child. Three unsurpassed practice strategies for supporting young children on the autism spectrum (including Asperger's Syndrome) in an early learning environment. The first strategy is reinforcement. Reinforcement is a critical strategy of evolving and maintaining the enthusiasm of this type of student. A teacher must use objective or actions that the students would like or enjoy that can be obtainable behavior. In my field experience observed I have seen the Pre-K teacher use the computer and smartboard to interact with the class as well

The article “What it takes to be great,” by Geoffrey Colvin is very well written. Geoffrey Colvin makes valid points to support his opinion on what it takes to be great. I agree with Colvin’s idea that to be great at something it requires hard work. He expands on this by saying it takes “deliberate practice.” What Colvin meant by “deliberate practice,” was that is performing not just to get something done, but to be efficient and push oneself to accomplish more. An example could be playing basketball. If a person shoots one hundred foul shots a day does not mean he or she is deliberately practicing. The best way to get better would be to make sure you made

Practice makes perfect, however, the skills are required to receive intensive training in order to be a skilled baseball player. “Practice makes perfect” meaning the more you do something, the better you will become at it. There are three essential ways of training to build my skills as a baseball player: batting a baseball is a tough skill to grasp, catching a fly ball is a very difficult thing to do, and running the bases are critical skill to develop. Everything is tough when I started to play little league baseball at age of nine. Meanwhile, it takes me three years to make it perfect. Perfection is almost impossible to accomplish, but perfection is impossible without practice.

Cote et al. (2007) points out the principle of the power law of practice, where great improvements are seen in the initial stages of practice, but the improvements level-off as one becomes an expert. This power relationship seems to be converted into a more linear relationship with increased deliberate practice. Violinists were studied, and time spent in deliberate practice was examined. By 18 years of age, experts accumulated 7,400 hours of practice, whereas intermediate-level performers had 5,300 hours, and lower-level performers only completed 3,400 hours. This linear law of practice seems to be generalizable to other domains, namely sport and chess (Cote et al., 2007, pp. 185). Although deliberate practice is very important, it is not the sole predictor of elite-level

These physical behaviours are learned through repetitive practice. A learner’s ability to perform these skills is based on precision, speed, distance, and technique. Learners’ general objectives would be to writes smoothly and legibly; accurately reproduces a picture, operates a computer skilfully,