By William Wittreich
A woman was walking through midtown Manhattan when she was approached by a man who asked her the question “how do I get to Carnegie Hall?”. The woman paused, smiled at him and said “practice, practice, practice”.
There are several professions that define their activities as a “practice”. Lawyers and doctors are the two obvious professions that come to mind. One would think that these folks practice constantly during their working lives because the information available to them, and the methods of applying that information, is ever changing. In other words, they will never “know it all”, so they must keep practicing.
But, is that not the reality for us all? Should we not be constantly practicing everything we do because the world is ever changing? Information is exponentially increasing, while at the same time the tools we are provided to assimilate that information are making it easier and faster to learn. Easier to practice life, so get to it!
That concept came home for me recently while I was in a yoga class. About ten years of attending classes had taken me to that moment, when I successfully did my first side crane pose. For all of those years, I had heard the instructors talk about our practice, but never thought much about it. Then it hit me, that I really had been practicing, and getting better, and that pose was a milestone to celebrate in my practice. So now it is going to take some time to master Wheel.
Skiing is another activity of mine that I have been practicing, without really knowing it. I have been skiing for more than 50 years, and being as old as I am, I am no longer skiing as fast as I used to, but my technique and control are the best they have ever been. I ski for fun, with constantly changing terrain and conditions keeping the experience fresh and interesting. But yes, I am regularly evaluating myself, trying to reduce the amount of effort I exert while directing myself into more challenging terrain. I wish I had this much commitment thirty years ago, when a youthful body would have allowed me to push my “practice” that much farther. But, I am happy now to go slow, and have fun.
I am in the IT business, software development to be more specific. My company develops and markets a room scheduling application that has recently celebrated twenty years of existence. A lot has happened over those twenty years, and even though the base programming language has remained the same, the application has been rewritten three times to adapt to changing coding techniques and computer hardware. So, it looks like I have an IT practice, since that world is ever changing. The application definitely has evolved with considerably more functionality presented in a more simplified interface, at significantly faster speeds. It is a challenge to keep up, but the need for constant practice means it will never get boring.
So, yes, in a perfect world, we would all be practicing our jobs and hobbies, but the reality is that some jobs are not ever changing. They are repetitious, and they get mastered relatively quickly. Retaining people at those jobs can be difficult just for that reason. Those people need to be practicing, with cross job training, additional certification and continuing education being a standard. It is up to management to define and create a job description that states the need to always be practicing, and advancing in ability and knowledge. Give a fish and you will feed someone for that moment. Teach them to fish, and you will feed them for a lifetime.
One last point I would like to make on this topic is I am practicing at writing. If you have made it this far through the article, you have benefitted from my practice (or not). I have been told that my prose often has a “technical” quality to it, so I have been trying to refine my sentence structure and verbiage to soften the prose. Is it working? I will just have to keep practicing.
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First published January 2019
Please send comments on this article to william@wwittreich.com.