Jeremy Côté

UNCATEGORIZED

What Are You Practicing?

Each day, you have a choice for how you can spend your time. This means that you can choose to do the training you need to do.

However, what does that look like, exactly?

It means training for the demands of what you want to do. If you want to write, you need to practice writing. If you want to play music, practice your instrument. If you want to run a fast race, you need to run workout.

That part is easy enough. But then there’s a subset of each of these things, and by being more specific in your training, you can help yourself achieve your goals at a faster rate. Training is great, but deliberate and purposeful training is what is needed to reach that next level.

If you want to write, practicing the craft is good. However, what exactly do you want to write? If it’s fiction, don’t use all your time journaling or writing non-fiction. Come up with stories! You need to be honing in on what you want to do, or else you’ll never be quite good enough.

If you want to play music, ask yourself what kind of music you enjoy playing. Then practice that (after the fundamentals, of course). If you want to run a fast race, workouts are great. But do you want to run a fast 400m, 5,000m, or 42,195m race? Each discipline requires different workouts to prepare for the demands of the race.

Practicing every day is great, but you need to know what you’re practicing for, or else you’ll just be the best writer, musician, or runner that can’t do anything specific. Finding your craft is important, but then you have to dig deeper and find that subset that really makes you happy. It doesn’t have to be forever, but finding a subset allows you to create much more specific and actionable goals than just being good at a domain “in general”.

Remember, practicing is good, but practicing for the specific demands of your craft is the key.