If you are a “learn by doing” person, you must check your perfectionism at the door for it to be effective. Why? At least for me, to “learn by doing” means that you:
- Do the thing
- Over and over
- In rapid succession.
Perfectionism can cripple the process in a couple ways, either:
- It prevents you from doing the thing in the first place, or
- It keeps you stuck doing the thing the first time endlessly until its “perfect”.
Hold on – in order to “learn by doing”, wouldn’t you want the “doing” part to be perfect? You know, so that you can experience what it’s like to do the thing perfectly, and then repeat that?
Not necessarily!
Perfectionism pretends to be the answer, but isn’t
If you’re learning a skill, it’s reasonable that the dream would be for you is to be able to do it perfectly, or as near perfect as possible. In order to achieve that, you must practice doing the skill… Well, perfectly.
So you take your time and really try to nail down each step of the process. Let’s say we’re painting in watercolour. Okay, we need to start by wetting the brush. Not too much, not too little. So we’ll spend a fair bit of time getting this right. Then we need to pick up some colour, and get the right consistency there. That will take some time to figure out as well. Now we need to pay special attention to our first brush strokes…
If you move through this process in this way from start to finish, perfecting each detail as you go, you’ll find yourself spending many hours on this single painting.
And you may produce one very impressive product for a beginner!
But when you go to start your next painting, you’ll have to start all the way back at square one. How do I figure out the right amount of water to pick up again…?
The issue is trying to learn too many skills all at once, with too much time in between each iteration of a single skill. This is why in painting, it’s more effective to start with simpler ideas. We begin with exercises that let you practice (over and over, fairly quickly) water control, without worrying about colour saturation. Once water control is coming more naturally, then move on to colour saturation techniques, and so-on.
The solution is to let go of those perfectionistic tendencies and let yourself learn one step at a time. No masterpieces are being achieved here, but the point is to develop one skill before building upon it with the next.
The key is frequent repetition in rapid succession
You can’t achieve this if you’re striving for perfection every time!
In all of my studies, and even in my career, I’ve found that frequent repetition in rapid succession was the most reliable way to learn something, and the most effective way to do this was to accept that the iteration I was about to do was probably going to be wrong. There would be a mistake somewhere.
If you can release the perfectionism, then you can embrace those mistakes as learning opportunities. The learning happens when you reflect on what exactly it was that went wrong, and then fix it.
I must credit my dad for this. Some time in high school I was feeling overwhelmed by the task of memorizing the parts of an eyeball. Admittedly, I don’t have the greatest memory and I found things like flashcards and reviewing notes ineffective. He suggested that I just try to draw and label what I could as fast as I could, then check my work and make all the corrections, and then to rapidly draw it out again. I repeated the process over and over until I was drawing it out without errors… And it stuck!
Memorizing the parts of an eyeball is a relatively simple task, but this perspective works on a much larger scale as well – so long as you’re not trying to do too much all at once!
Apart from eyeballs and watercolour, this has helped me in:
- Case-writing while studying for professional exams. While some people study by spending hours on one case at a time attempting to hit every point and achieve a near-perfect answer, most students find it more effective to attempt a case quickly, immediately mark it, learn from the mistakes made, and move on to the next one. For the old Chartered Accountants’ Uniform Exam, we did this like it was a job. Our study group would get together for seven to eight hours a day, five days a week, for two months, just going through this process over and over. (We had a lot of old cases available!)
- Blogging. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of trying to write a “perfect post”, but you’ll rarely hit “publish” this way. Pick one thing you want to try or improve upon in your next blog post. Try it. Revisit it later, see what worked and what didn’t. Hit “publish” before you revisit just to up the ante! Then try it again in your next post, and watch your blog become a journal of all your wonderful growth and development.
- Learning at work, especially the technical stuff. Maybe it’s obvious, but I think it’s worth mentioning – you don’t get to take the time to create an absolutely “perfect” product in the world of business. Still, when it comes to the learning end of things, I think we can easily get stuck trying to deep-dive into technical research and learn everything we can about an area before we start doing it. Honestly, it is more effective to do your best, receive queries on your work, learn from them, and move on to the next one. Tax season is an excellent time for learning – with such a high volume of tax returns flowing through your desk, you can’t help but feel like kind-of an expert by the end of it. Talk about rapid sucession!
Do you find perfectionism is helpful to your learning, or harmful? Do you use the rapid repetition method? Comment below!
