“The good news is, nigga, you came a long way
The bad news is, nigga, you went the wrong way.”

—J. Cole, “Love Yourz”

Everyone knows that “practice makes perfect.” You may have even heard the adage, for added clarity, “Perfect practice makes perfect.”

But what many people forget is that this sword cuts both ways.

If you practice the wrong thing, you become proficient at the wrong thing. Something I see repeatedly in boxing—and that I think applies to many other areas of life—is people spending years doing something the wrong way, only for that incorrect practice to limit how far they can go.

Worse than practicing the wrong thing for years is having success with the wrong thing. And you probably read that and thought, “Well, how can I have success if I’m practicing the wrong thing?”

Well, that’s easy.

Initially, you’re facing weak competition. They don’t know how to take advantage of your mistakes or weaknesses, so your success against them inflates your perception of your abilities.

Then you take a step up in competition. While these guys aren’t world-beaters, they don’t have the weaknesses you have. Furthermore, because they don’t have those weaknesses and have moved past everyone who does, they can soundly defeat you.

The worst part about these defeats is that the fighter often comes away believing they need to work harder and train more. That, by itself, is a great attitude to have in response to a loss or setback.

The problem is that they’ll go back to practicing the same things that caused them to lose in the first place, only with renewed intensity. In the cruelest twist of irony, they actually become worse by working harder because they’re working harder on the wrong things.

I’ve also found that many people, when confronted with the fact that their entire approach is the problem, become defensive. I used to think this was simply stubbornness, but I’ve realized that it’s often the result of committing so much time and energy to one way that, even when a better path appears, they refuse to switch to a different method.

Sometimes it is stubbornness. It’s not that these people don’t want to win. It’s that they’d rather lose their way than win doing it someone else’s—even if that way has been proven to work.

[Continued after today's sponsor]

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Other times, they aren’t interested in confronting their weaknesses. It’s a humbling experience to realize that your entire approach is wrong and that all of your success is effectively a combination of beginner’s luck and weak competition.

But what I find most often is that people simply don’t have the tolerance to practice the right things the right way.

Learning anything properly means building a solid foundation.

The basics are already boring. But when you combine that with the fact that you need to practice them so often that they don’t just become automatic but become part of you—and then keep practicing them, regardless of how far you get—most people give up.

Building a foundation takes a tremendous amount of time. Think about how you fell in love with whatever you have a high level of ability in. Your first exposure was likely to someone performing it at a high level in the spotlight after years of training and sacrifice.

Rarely did you decide to make something your thing because you watched beginners stumble around or heard about their losses, injuries, and failures along the way.

So when people realize just how much time it takes to get good—with additional time built in because they have to unlearn and correct bad habits—they lose the will to embark on that journey.

The lesson of this short essay should be taken via negativa—that is, by understanding what you should not do.

If you want to become good at something—and it doesn’t matter what that something is—this is the exact strategy you should follow:

1. Accept that it will take two years of constant practice before you’re even a beginner. Yes, you may achieve some designation or have success that suggests you’re more advanced than that, but proficiency takes time. If you want it quickly, you’ll never get it.
2. Build a tolerance for boredom. If something needs to be exciting or novel for you to be motivated to do it, then you’ll remain mediocre. Anything worth doing will either include things that are boring but necessary or require you to practice well past the point of boredom to become proficient.
3. Take advice from those who struggled but succeeded despite those struggles. There are two types of people you should be wary of listening to: those who had a little success but stalled out—usually because of one of the aforementioned traits—and those who were uniquely talented. The former know just enough to be dangerous, while the latter have no idea how they succeeded. Both will mislead you with what they tell you, but each for different reasons.