Perfect at what?
For a whole month, Kabir went to the school nets every evening. His friend Rohan threw him ball after ball. Kabir hit almost all of them.
On match day he walked out to bat. The first ball swung. It curved in the air, late, and went past his bat. So did the second.
The third came straight. He hit it hard.
The fourth and fifth swung too. Both beat him. The sixth took his stumps.
Kabir walked off and sat down outside the boundary rope.
A month of practice, every evening. So why did it not show?
The idea
Kabir had not been lazy. He had not been unlucky either.
People who study practice have one sentence for what happened.
The idea
Training transfers only to what you actually rehearse.
Take it in two pieces.
Training is doing a thing again and again, to get better at it.
Transfer is when it shows up later, on another day. A thing learnt at the nets transfers when it works in the match.
Rohan’s balls all came straight. Every one of them went the same way through the air.
So Kabir’s month did transfer. It transferred to straight balls. The match brought a different thing.
Only to what you actually rehearse is the second piece. To rehearse is to do the very thing, the way it will come on the day.
A ball that swings is not a straight ball done badly. It is its own thing, and it needs its own practice.
Salim bhaiya bowls for the senior team, and he can swing the ball. For the next month he bowled to Kabir twice a week.
Kabir was beaten again and again at first. Then less. Then hardly at all.
What people say instead
The week before the match, Mamaji had come to visit. He played cricket for his college, long ago.
“Practice is practice, beta,” he said, showing a drive in the middle of the room. “Hit a hundred more balls, and it will all come. Practice makes perfect.”
He meant it kindly. Practice had worked for him, on the pitches he knew.
Kabir did not argue. He had thought the same thing all month.
But he kept turning the saying over. Practice makes perfect. Perfect at what?
Two more places
The same shape turned up in Kabir’s own team.
In that match they dropped four high catches. So all week they ran extra laps of the ground, to get fit.
In the next match, four high catches went up. All four went down again.
Running laps is running. It is not watching a ball fall out of the sky and closing your hands on it.
Getting fit is good for lots of things. But a high catch needs its own practice: balls sent up high, again and again, into waiting hands.
Kabir’s neighbour Farah runs every morning. She does one long, easy loop round the lake before school.
On sports day she ran three races. She was near the front in the long one.
In the two short dashes she was near the back, behind girls who never run in the mornings at all.
Farah had rehearsed running far. A dash is running fast, for a few seconds, from a standing start. It is a different thing.
Spot it
One more place. Look at it the same way.
1
Rohan revised for the maths test all week. He did the short sums at the start of the chapter, again and again. The test has two short sums, then three long word problems. Which will go well?
2
What could Rohan have practised, so that more of the test went well?
Kabir looked up practice in his old dictionary. It said: doing something again and again. It did not say which thing.
He read it twice. The nets had been something, again and again. So had the laps, and the loop of the lake. The dictionary was right. It just left out the part that mattered most.
What you practise
Rohan’s two short sums went well. The three word problems did not. He had rehearsed the short ones only.
A week of the long ones too, and those would have had a practice of their own.
The nets, the laps, the lake and the revision are one shape. Each practice carried over to the thing it rehearsed. It did not carry over to anything else, however much of it there was.
Nobody in any of them was lazy. They all practised hard. Each practised a different thing from the one the day brought.
The name
People who train players call this specificity. Specific means one exact thing, not things in general.
Practice makes you better at the specific thing you practised, done the way you practised it.
Mamaji was nearly right. Practice does make perfect. It makes you perfect at the thing you practised.
When Kabir told him, Mamaji laughed. “Perfect at what, indeed,” he said.
Now, before Kabir practises anything, he asks first what the day will bring.
This week, at home
Pick one thing you practise: a sport, an instrument, sums, your handwriting. Write down what the day itself will ask of you. Then write down what your practice has been. Where are they the same thing? Ask someone older what they practised a lot, and what the real day actually asked of them.
Kabir thought of Kanada, a thinker who lived in India more than two thousand years ago. Kanada liked to ask what a thing is made of, down to the smallest parts you can still tell apart. Batting is not one thing. It is the straight ball, the one that swings, the short one, the slow one. Each is its own part, and each needs its own practice.
Where you will see this next
Next chapter: what your body is doing on the days you do not practise.