Crossposted from Nicole Dieker Dot Com. The third and final part in my piano practice series, as promised.

If you follow me on Twitter —

and I’m not at all sure if you should, since Twitter seems to be less valuable to me every successive day —

which in turn makes me less interested in adding value to it —

but anyway, if you read the tweets, you might have seen this one:

Nicole Dieker @HelloTheFuture

I'm going to write more about this tomorrow, but last night I told L that I had discovered "the secret to learning" and he told me that I was correct, except for the part where I was the first person to discover it

January 26th 2022

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Over the past month I have, in fact, discovered the secret to learning — and even if I am not the first person to make this particular discovery, it still counts.

Now I have the somewhat difficult task of telling you what it is.

Here’s how I explained it to L:

Define win condition.
Define action you are going to take to achieve win condition.
Take defined action.
Evaluate action both against its original definition (that is, did you do what you said you were going to do or did you do something else) and against the win condition.
1. If you’re me, write down the results. If you’re L, keep them in your head. (He keeps all of this in his head. I have no idea how his head can handle it. He told me that he might have more storage space in his working memory because he thinks of things in bits and symbols instead of words.)
Ask yourself what is keeping you from achieving your win condition. Describe it as specifically as possible.
1. If you’re me, write it down.
Define action you are going to take to solve/address/eliminate obstacle preventing win condition.
Repeat 2-7 until win condition is achieved.
STOP.

Step #8 — STOP AFTER WIN — is more important to the process than I originally realized. At first I assumed that once you hit WIN you could REPEAT WIN, maybe REPEAT WIN 5 CONSECUTIVE PASSES, but it doesn’t work that way.

Once your brain hits WIN, it’s done with that particular problem for that particular practice session. Successive passes during the same practice session are more likely to be unfocused fails, which introduce inconsistencies that have to be resolved by running additional (time-consuming, frustrating) learning loops.

Plus, STOPPING AFTER WIN sets up a work environment in which you are CONTINUALLY RETURNING TO WON SEQUENCES.

I feel like I just c...

Paul Lindemeyer

Paul Lindemeyer