Among the array of canvases scattered around my home, this is the only painting created purely as a learning exercise. I was frustrated with my atrocious rocks, so I cornered myself alone with some paintbrushes and images of rocks until I figured out how to splash paint so that it looked like shadows and highlights on a bit of stone.
All of my other paintings were conceived with a final piece in mind. A sunrise over the ocean, a towering tree, the delicate petals of a sunflower... I find myself learning as I go along, but the knowledge is a byproduct of painting something beautiful.
I think this reveals something interesting about what practice looks like.
Most of the reward in painting – at least for me -- is in creating beauty. Encouraging a picture to take shape on my canvas is fun. Painting rocks over and over? Not so much.
But does only painting entire pieces make me the best painter I could be?
Perhaps.
Despite my love of deliberate practice, the ideal of practicing established exercises under the guidance of an expert teacher is impractical for most skills. Without clear direction on which skills to practice, I’m not sure we should aim for mastering one piece of a skill through repetitive.
It might work better to practice while producing output you're genuinely interested in. The key, however, is to still practice, not just “do the task”!
Practicing, not just doing
I learned to paint clouds and waves by following YouTube tutorials to paint a few seascapes, slowly but surely absorbing the techniques needed to portray the capricious nature of water and sky. Both the paintings below were made with a reference photo but no tutorial. You can judge for yourself how the left painting (before the tutorials) compares with the right painting (after a few tutorials). (Both were painted from just a reference photo.)
Following the tutorials was still very much practicing, not doing something I already knew how to do. The paintings took longer, I needed to learn new techniques, I used the comparison of my painting and the instructor’s as rapid feedback, and I was entirely focused on making each stroke look more like hers. For comparison, once I’d learned the techniques, I could make a painting in half the time while feeling more relaxed.
Is one method better?
It’s certainly easier to spend more time on the bottleneck skill if you don’t also have to paint the rest of the picture for each practice attempt.
However, I’m not sure that practicing in context is less effective, controlling for the actual amount of time spent practicing. I tried comparing my progress painting rocks vs clouds. (While I dedicated a few hours to practicing rocks, clouds were only given the spotlight as part of a complete painting.)
While I saw more noticeable improvement in painting rocks in one practice session, I’m estimating that my overall time painting rocks and clouds along with a tutorial are similar or a couple hours more on clouds. However, I subjectively feel that my improvement in clouds is more than on rocks, so this example doesn’t indicate much difference in the two types of practice.
However, it’s easier to identify your bottlenecks when practicing a skill in the context of a real task. It prevents you from inadvertently learning the wrong skills. Since you can see immediately if the practice is helping, you’re less likely to take away the wrong lessons from a toy environment. The immediate feedback from your canvas allows you to correct your course. If you’re not sure what success looks like, then practicing in the real environment is crucial.
For example, when I practiced outlining posts to limit post length and speed up writing posts, I then drafted posts from the outlines. I wouldn’t have realized how poorly I stuck to outlines if I hadn't put them to use in drafting my posts.
I think I was underestimating the benefit of seeing whether your practice improved your work. However, there’s probably an even more important consideration.
Empirically, I practice more in context. At least for me, practicing a particular technique demands more willpower and energy. Yet, it was relatively easy to practice in the middle of a painting if part of the painting looks bad. I want a beautiful painting – it annoys me if it’s not turning out the way I envisioned!
I don’t know if I’d learn faster practicing in isolation, but I’m do know I’m more likely to practice at all in context. In the end, that’s probably enough of a reason to focus on practicing while producing output.
When 'Practice' Morphs into 'Doing'
However, I’m worried that people will think they’re practicing in context when, in fact, they're merely performing the task as they've always done it or they’re not receiving feedback on how they’re doing. This process really only works if you’re focusing on trying a new method and getting feedback about how it’s going.
Honestly, unless you deliberately pay attention to learning better techniques, you might never even realize there are better ways of doing the task. When I started blogging a couple years ago, I assumed that posting once a month was a good rate. I once wrote and posted a short post in the same day, but I thought it was a lucky fluke. Afterall, most of my blog posts took weeks of research and rewriting. It didn't even cross my mind that I could dissect the process and learn how to regularly churn out daily posts.
That blindness to opportunities to improve is my primary concern with practicing in context. It’s easy to think of the task as “the set of steps you already know and have done before to complete this task”. That’s fine sometimes. Sometimes you just want to get the job done.
But it’s not going to make you better, at least not quickly. You need new techniques and you need good feedback loops for that.
If you want to set those up, I’m happy to help! You can schedule a free 30-minute call to talk about it here.