DELIBERATE PRACTICE 101
Image Credit: Richard Avedon
You have to keep monitoring yourself.
Twyla Tharp (1941—) is an American dancer, choreographer, and author who lives and works in New York City. In 1966 she formed the company Twyla Tharp Dance. Her work often uses classical music, jazz, and contemporary pop music.
Tharp a legend in the world of dance. She's put on well over 100 dances, ballets, and other performances – either dancing in them or choreographing them. She's been dancing in a professional setting for 45 years and is now 78 years old now. And she's still working just as hard as ever. You can watch her dance in a recent profile from the New York Times – it's one of the most hypnotic and mesmerizing things you'll see all day.
“Anything that one does seriously requires practice, and practice is habit,” she says. “Rebellion, like creativity, doesn’t just fly off the walls. It’s pretty well studied and thought-through.
“Without the structure there’s sloppiness, carelessness, forgetfulness. Waste.” Tharp purses her lips, warming to her argument. “Don’t like waste. Waste is ungrateful.”
This pronouncement hangs in the air, ringing. Like steps fit to music, Tharp’s point strikes a perfect note with her crisp presence, her church-like living space, the Puritan work ethic she’s been describing. Waste not, want not.
“To waste anything is to be ungrateful for what we are given, which is enormous,” she continues. “Look at what we’ve been given in this country, in relation to so many. The time to work, the food to eat, having the opportunity to learn, to read.” She chides herself, briefly, for being imperfect and becoming lax at times. She remedies that with another duty, she says: writing out tomorrow’s schedule the day before.
Twyla Tharp is the greatest choreographer of our era. Her groundbreaking career in dance blended classical ballet with contemporary culture. Now, at age 78, Tharp is sharing her innovative approach to health and aging in a new book. Jeffrey Brown visited the American Ballet Theater recently to ask Tharp what she looks for in fellow dancers and why she is urging us all to “Keep It Moving.”
Whenever she starts a new project, Twyla Tharp gets out a banker’s box. She writes about her system in The Creative Habit:
Everyone has his or her own organizational system. Mine is a box, the kind you can buy at Office Depot for transferring files.
I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as the piece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance. This means notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of art that may have inspired me.
The box documents active research on every project….
There are separate boxes for everything I’ve ever done. If you want a glimpse into how I think and work, you could do worse than to start with my boxes.
The box makes me feel organized, that I have my act together even when I don’t know where I’m going yet.
It also represents a commitment. The simple act of writing a project name on the box means I’ve started work.
The box makes me feel connected to a project. It is my soil. I feel this even when I’ve back-burnered a project: I may have put the box away on a shelf, but I know it’s there. The project name on the box in bold black lettering is a constant reminder that I had an idea once and may come back to it very soon.
Most important, though, the box means I never have to worry about forgetting. One of the biggest fears for a creative person is that some brilliant idea will get lost because you didn’t write it down and put it in a safe place. I don’t worry about that because I know where to find it. It’s all in the box….
They’re easy to buy, and they’re cheap….They’re one hundred percent functional; they do exactly what I want them to do: hold stuff. I can write on them to identify their contents… I can move them around… When one box fills up, I can easily unfold and construct another. And when I’m done with the box, I can ship it away out of sight, out of mind, so I can move on to the next project, the next box.
Easily acquired. Inexpensive. Perfectly functional. Portable. Identifiable. Disposable. Eternal enough.
Those are my criteria for the perfect storage system. And I’ve found the answer in a simple file box.
DELIBERATE PRACTICE 101
Deliberate practice is made up of hard work and planning.
HARD WORK + PLANNING = DELIBERATE PRACTICE
HARD WORK
There is no substitute for the ability to deliberately showing up. Hard work is not always about working hard. Sometimes finding the easiest way to solve a problem can also be a sign of elegant, efficient thinking. Bill Gates has stated, “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” In the long run, however, that engineer won’t fully develop their talents, wrestle with complexity, and innovate on tough problems. That requires a more serious application of effort.
There is a time in our careers when we think: “I’m going to do what I do better than anyone else.” As we mature our thinking shifts to: “I’m going to do what I do to the best of my ability.” Some people interpret that statement as contentment with 3rd place. Competing against one’s self is a sign of maturity. We learn later in our lives that we only have control over ourselves.
As we gain depth in our craft—whatever that is—we learn to critique and evaluate our work. We read up on the topic, take classes to advance our knowledge, and connect with others doing something similar. Sometimes we mentor and teach novices, seeing through their eyes, further deepening our understanding of the skill, context, and ability to improvise. We view our craft from multiple perspectives.
How do we learn to become more intentional and deliberate with our learning?
PLANNING
Hard work, when unfocused, can lead us astray. Showing up to practice is one thing, but how much time do we invest in preparing for effective practice? Planning is a key component of hard work.
Sports coaches meticulously plan every aspect of their teams’ practice. They calculate drills to the minute. Every element of their sessions is choreographed, including where the practice equipment is placed. Coaches do not want any time lost by players running to a misplaced equipment bin.
Practices start and end on time. If practice does not end on time, players start to hold back a little effort and save their energy. Coaches want their players to try their best throughout practice, so they become sticklers for time management.
If we carefully orchestrate our practice, we work harder and get more done in less time. If we are to rise in our Craft, we need to work hard, but we also need to be deliberate about the time we are putting in. Planning places effort where effort is most needed. People who combine these two ideas have a firm foundation of deliberate practice upon which they can move toward success.
How do we get better at emphasizing what we need to practice and when?
PRACTICE:
Choose an aspect of your craft and study it thoroughly.
Make a list of issues in your life that need some hard work.
Choose one area and establish a plan to develop excellence.
Who will you contact?
What will you read?
What will you do?
COMMIT
[ ] I commit myself to a lifestyle of hard work so that I can reach my fullest potential.
PRACTICE
Make a list of the activities you do each week.
Estimate the time spent on each activity.
Does the time spent reflect the amount of time you’d like to spend?
What kind of boundaries do you place on yourself? Do you start and end on time?
What changes do you need to make to better manage your time and become more deliberate in your practice?
COMMIT
[ ] I commit to myself to establishing and maintaining a time for reflection and preparation.
FURTHER READING/ WATCHING
The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life — This book frames creativity as the product of preparation, routine and persistent effort — which may at first seem counterintuitive in the context of the Eureka! myth and our notion of the genius suddenly struck by a brilliant idea, but Tharp demonstrates it’s the foundation of how cultural icons and everyday creators alike, from Beethoven to professional athletes to ordinary artists, hone their craft, cultivate their genius, and overcome their fears.
Keep It Moving: Lessons for the Rest of Your Life — An inspiring guide to unlocking one's creative potential provides a wealth of exercises, anecdotes, and advice that comprise evaluating one's creative history, stimulating oneself by becoming active, and making time for creative change.
In Her Words…
“Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits. That’s it in a nutshell.” ― The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
“Better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.” ― The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
“When you're in a rut, you have to question everything except your ability to get out of it.” ― The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
“You may wonder which came first: the skill or the hard work. But that's a moot point. The Zen master cleans his own studio. So should you.” ― The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
“A lot of habitually creative people have preparation rituals linked to the setting in which they choose to start their day. By putting themselves into that environment, they start their creative day.
The composer Igor Stravinsky did the same thing every morning when he entered his studio to work: He sat at the piano and played a Bach fugue. Perhaps he needed the ritual to feel like a musician, or the playing somehow connected him to musical notes, his vocabulary. Perhaps he was honoring his hero, Bach, and seeking his blessing for the day. Perhaps it was nothing more than a simple method to get his fingers moving, his motor running, his mind thinking music. But repeating the routine each day in the studio induced some click that got him started.
In the end, there is no ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn't scare you, doesn't shut you down. It should make you want to be there, and once you find it, stick with it. To get the creative habit, you need a working environment that's habit-forming. All preferred working states, no matter how eccentric, have one thing in common: When you enter into them, they compel you to get started.” ― The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
“But obligation, I eventually saw, is not the same as commitment, and it's certainly not an acceptable reason to stick with something that isn't working.” ― The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
“Remember this when you're struggling for a big idea. You're much better off scratching for a small one.” ― The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
“If you're at a dead-end, take a deep breath, stamp your foot, and shout "Begin!" You never know where it will take you.” ― The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
“Our ability to grow is directly proportional to an ability to entertain the uncomfortable.” ―The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
“You don’t get lucky without preparation, and there’s no sense in being prepared if you’re not open to the possibility of a glorious accident.” ― The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
“I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as the piece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance.” ― The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
“Venturing out of your comfort zone may be dangerous, yet do it anyways because our ability to grow is directly proportional to an ability to entertain the uncomfortable.” ― The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
“As Mozart himself wrote to a friend, “People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.” ― The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
“Do them anyway - you can never spend enough time on the basics.” ― The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
“Creativity is not just for artists. It’s for businesspeople looking for a new way to close a sale; it’s for engineers trying to solve a problem; it’s for parents who want their children to see the world in more than one way.” ― The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
“Dance is a tough life (and a tougher way to make a living). Choreography is even more brutal because there is no way to carry our history forward. Our creations disappear the moment we finish performing them. It’s tough to preserve a legacy, create a history for yourself and others. But I put all that aside and pursued my gut instinct anyway. I became my own rebellion. Going with your head makes it arbitrary. Going with your gut means you have no choice.” ―The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
What we don’t see on the resumes we review or the job descriptions we want is the litany of emotional entanglements we bring to our roles, uninvited, to the team and organizations we work in. Alongside technical skills, people who can master a range of subjective skills are better able to influence, deal with ambiguity, bounce back from setbacks, think creatively, and manage themselves in the presence of setbacks. In short, those who learn lead.
Observing subjective qualities in others past and present gives us a mental picture for the behaviors we want to practice. Each figure illustrates a quality researched from The Look to Craftsmen Project. When practiced as part of our day-to-day, these qualities will help us develop our mastery in our lives and work.