Tweet

Getting good at ANYTHING requires countless hours of repetition, whether it be riding a bicycle, cooking dinner or singing rap songs.

No matter how naturally talented you are, you need to practice to excel at something. The more you practice, the better you get.

Practice Makes Perfect

Most people fail to achieve success simply because they haven’t had enough repetition. They have not practiced enough and they have not failed enough times.

If you do something for the first time and you’re successful at it, you may think you’re naturally gifted and there’s no need to practice to get better. Having success at something new the first time can be very dangerous because it may fool you into thinking that you have skills while in fact you just got lucky.

I once read the teachings of an old kung-fu master and he said the following:

• It takes you 2-4 years to get good at something.
• It takes you another 2-4 years to get really good at something.
• It takes you a lifetime to become a master at something.

Repetition, repetition, repetition and…yup you guessed it, more repetition. That’s what it takes to get good. That’s the recipe for success: do something over and over and over again until you perfect it, and then move on to the next aspect of what you’re trying to master.

Why do you think that in martial arts dojo’s (training halls) the students are required to do the same techniques thousands of times for months on end? Because repetition is the recipe for success!

I remember my Tae-Kwando instructor telling me that when he was learning the martial art in the Korean army, his instructors would greet the students in the morning, show them a technique (for example, a “side-kick”) and say, “Now do 3000 of those”. My instructor would do nothing else the whole day but just practice that side-kick over and over and over again. Through the sheer amount of repetition, the action would become an automatic habit that no longer needs any conscious attention…

Repetition – The Recipe for Success (It Creates Habits)

There are two main benefits of endless repetition. The first one is that repetition creates habits. Repetition causes actions or processes that require your conscious attention to become automatic habits controlled by the subconscious.

Take learning to drive a manual car for example. At first you need to consciously give all your attention to the gear changing process. You need to watch the rev meter, you need to think, “Foot off the gas, clutch in, change gear, let go of clutch, accelerate”. As your practice and as you repeat the process more and more, it starts to become a subconscious habit. You no longer need to think about the entire process or look at the rev meter, you know that when the engine makes a certain sound that you need to change gears, and you do it quickly and without thinking about it.

In the gear-changing example above, the obvious benefit of repetition is that you make the process a subconscious habit. This frees up your conscious focus that you can use to watch the road (and thus increase your chances of avoiding an accident) instead of focusing on the individual mechanics of changing gears.

Repetition has this effect of creating habits with everything. Whether it be formulas, music, finances or any process. Heck, even with martial arts you practice the same blocking technique thousands of times so that the technique becomes a reflex that you don’t even think about. For example: you can be sitting down writing an exam and when a punch gets thrown at you, your arms will automatically block the punch without you even thinking about it, simply because you’ve done that action over and over again and you’ve trained your brain with something like: “fist coming at you = execute blocking technique automatically”.

Repetition – The Recipe for Success (Eliminate Luck)

The second benefit of repetition is that you eliminate luck.

As I mentioned earlier in this article, the worst thing that can happen to you is that you are tricked into believing that you’re good at something while you in fact only got lucky the first time around.

Through mass amounts of repetition, you’ll experience most of the factors that can go wrong. You’ll experience all the things that can cause you to fail, things that you normally wouldn’t know about without having done all the repetition.

Sticking to the example of driving a car…
Let’s say that you’ve learned all the theory of how the car works, and how you should drive it on the road. Let’s say you’ve learned the technique of driving the car, changing gears and the rules of the road. Let’s say you’re able to drive from your house to your friend’s house, or to the mall or even to the next city. Just because you can do that (without problems) a couple of times does not mean you’re a good driver, or that you know how to handle yourself when various other factors come into play. What happens if you’re driving fast (because you think you’re a good driver) and something happens that you haven’t experienced before (like a car with it’s indicator on but the driver doesn’t actually know it’s on)? If you haven’t seen this before and assume the car will turn just because its indicator is on it could lead to a nasty accident.

Do you see what I mean?

Through repetition (lots of driving) you’ll experience many other problem factors like: bad drivers, obstacles on the road, pedestrians, heavy rain, mist, distractions like music and cell phones etc.

The more of these factors you experience, the better a driver you’ll become because the chances of you being surprised by something you’ve never experienced get smaller and smaller. The more you repeat something, the more variations of the initial scenario you’ll experience and the more complete you’ll become at mastering it.

Lil Wayne on “Repetition”

A documentary about Lil Wayne actually inspired me to write this article.

For those of you who haven’t heard of Lil Wayne, he’s a very successful American rapper. He joined the record label ‘Cash Money Records’ at just 9 years old and has released multiple albums, of which his latest (The Carter III) was the most successful selling over 1 million copies in the first week of the release.

You may be a bit shocked by his appearance or by the language he uses, but Lil Wayne is definitely someone I look up to in terms of how hard he worked to get out of the Ghettos to where he is today.

Here’s a short extract from a documentary with him where he talks about ‘Repetition’.
(Click Here if you can’t see the video)

Repetition, repetition, repetition! Wanna leave a comment?

Repetition is the recipe for success!