Practice, or the simple art of 'doing'.
This week's theme: Practice.
Practice makes perfect - 10,000 hours and no less.
However, this issue is not about perfection - it’s about the simple art of ‘doing’. To practice is to repeatedly perform an ability or exercise a skill in order to improve or maintain one’s proficiency. Work, for instance, is a practice. Waking up at a specific time, is a practice. Reading, doing artwork, or getting caught up on the latest tech bytes are all forms of practice.
I venture to say that our culture doesn’t give practicing enough credit. You typically only see the home-run hits in a persons’ social media account or linkedin profile. The messy part in the middle is really what matters - the foul balls.
Practicing is something anyone can access in their lives - it is a choice to enjoy learning and routinely find better ways to do that thing. That’s something only you can do for yourself.
My ask for you: Pick something that you want to do daily, and next time you start that thing, remember to enjoy the practice of it.
This post was originally published on 12/11/2020.THE LATEST
🎹 A musician who practices live on Twitch
Lara de Wit — Where most people on Twitch are live-streaming their game-playing, Lara de Wit live-streams her piano playing. She’s been playing since the age of 6, but it wasn’t until she heard music in video games on her NES that she realized she could play a song by ear. Instead of trying to be a famous concert pianist, Lara is giving performances online — in her own way.
💪 It doesn’t have to be perfect - if you learn something from the daily practice
'The Practice' — Seth Godin has just released his 20th book - “The Practice” - which could not be a better pick for this issue of the Edgelist. Doing creative work is risky because it might not work. Godin suggests making your ‘Practice’ better by surrounding yourself with people who have your back: they will encourage you to do the work and know how to give you constructive criticism. Ignore the rest.
🧩 Make a pattern within this framework to learn how Ben Barry made 100 of them for his book
Ben Barry — One Hundred Patterns compiles designer Ben Barry’s daily patterns. Each pattern was made within a framework of restrictions, such as base unit size, a limited number of rotations, and a specified color palette. Take this Figma file and practice making your own.
🧠Train your brain with these daily, interactive logic puzzles
Brilliant — Brilliant is a platform to up-level your logic, math, and computer science skills. Whether you’re a design-nerd who loves quiz UX or a hobbyist logician, their courses are an interactive and fun way to keep your mind sharp. PS - I’m taking the logic one right now.
🖐 Guidelines for creating a "Human-First" CLI - a better daily experience for human developers
CLIG — Written by some experienced developers in the industry, this is a fantastic guide for building a command line program with a "human-first" perspective. Whether you're building an internal toolchain for your team or a major implementation used by thousands of developers, this is worth a read.
🎞 Several people have implemented VR tech into their daily practice
Less Wrong — A thoughtful write-up about the author's experience attempting to work full-time in a virtual reality environment. The author acknowledges some definite productivity gains and points out some areas for growth.
🎮 The daily grind of creating & releasing a NES game cartridge in 2020
Matt Hughson — Matt writes about his experience creating a new game for a machine released in the US in 1985! As interesting as the tech stack is, reading about Matt's productivity habits, routine, and persistence. He describes the day-to-day journey required to build a game, produce a physical game "cart", and selling/shipping units. All with a full time job and family.
As always, special shoutout to Taylor Beseda for helping curate this content.
Follow him on twitter @tbeseda.