My high school swim coach, Mr. B., used to tell us, “Practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes permanent.”

If you practice something incorrectly, you will only know how to do it that way.

If you want perfection, well, you will have to practice it perfectly. But what does that look like?

I am amazed by the similarities between masters in different fields. Even though they may have chosen to dedicate their lives to different things, they have far more in common than one would expect: the amount of time and energy that they put into their work, into deliberate practice, their routine. They spend a lot of time doing exercises and drills.

That’s how you train and develop. You have to train the body and the mind slowly, over time. It’s not something that you can do all at once, it doesn’t happen right away. So why do we so often expect the returns all at once? Why do we get frustrated when our gains aren’t quick enough?

While swimming, we would run exercises isolating a single area, just like most of my climbing examples. We might do laps where we just focused on kicking, laps where we would only focus on the stroke, and laps where all we would focus on is breathing. We’d always start out really slow, and eventually, once the form was correct, we would increase speed. How we practiced was how we swam, so that when we raced, we didn’t think about it, it was second nature—we just did it.

As you work your way through your problems and projects and develop your practice, you need to refocus your expectations and time horizons. Take the long approach. You might have to retrain yourself, take back years of sloppy practice, and finally sit down and learn to type, rather than hunting and pecking. Admit to yourself that you’ve cut corners in the past, but now you want to improve. You have to be willing to start slow and learn. Admit that you may need some assistance to develop.

In swimming, use a kickboard, or that damn floaty thingy you stick between your legs, or fins to help you train.

In climbing maybe you need to grab the draw, and lower in from above.

Are you practicing correctly? Or are you just doing what you have to do to survive? Stop cheating yourself and your form.

Slow down!

Even when I am chopping vegetables at home, I remind myself of the correct form that I learned from my friend’s father who was a chef, so that I wouldn’t cut my fingers. “Slow down, Erich,” I remind myself, “you need those fingers.”

As you move forward with your practice, be mindful of your form, your habits, your routines, your patterns. How do you go about your practice? Are you taking the time to practice correctly?

If you practice lazy, you will only know how to do lazy work. If you practice disinterested, you will only know disinterested work. If you are scattered and unfocused in your practice, you will only know that, and if your practice is rushed or hurried, well…you get the idea.

If you practice good, you will know good work. If you practice great, you will be great. And if you practice excellently, you will know excellence.

However you practice, remember: practice makes permanent.