When the “Art of Practice” author conducted a survey of over five hundred athletes, artists, and performers, he asked seven questions. Not about their strengths or their successes — about their frustrations, their failed strategies, and their mistakes.
The responses came from people across wildly different disciplines. Jugglers, musicians, dancers, acrobats, martial artists. People who had nothing in common except a commitment to getting better at something that required practice.
The results were startling in their uniformity.
The same mistakes. The same frustrations. The same failed strategies. Over and over again, across five hundred respondents from dozens of different fields, the patterns were identical. Not similar — identical.
This wasn’t what I expected. I assumed that different disciplines would produce different failure modes. That a musician’s practice problems would be fundamentally different from an athlete’s, which would be different from a magician’s. Instead, the survey revealed that failure in practice is remarkably standardized. We all fail the same way, for the same reasons, regardless of what we’re practicing.
I’d found this in my own smaller-scale observations, but the survey data confirmed it with a sample size that removed any doubt. These were universal mistakes — hardwired into how human beings approach the challenge of getting better at anything.
Here are the seven I found most significant. Every one of them was a mistake I was making myself.
Mistake One: Spending Most Practice Time on What You Can Already Do
This was the most common failure pattern across every discipline, every skill level, every background. The majority of practitioners spent the majority of their practice time on techniques and routines they had already learned.
The logic seems sound. You need to maintain your skills. You need to keep your fundamentals sharp. You can’t neglect the foundation while building the upper floors.
But “maintaining” skills that are already at ninety percent doesn’t require eighty percent of your practice time. It requires a fraction of that. The rest of the time — the vast majority of it — should be spent on the things you can’t yet do. On the frontier of your ability, where failure is frequent and adaptation is active.
The survey respondents didn’t describe this as a choice. They described it as a natural drift. Over time, their practice sessions accumulated more and more routine material, and the space for new challenges shrank until it disappeared entirely. One day they looked up and realized they’d been practicing for months without improving at anything.
I recognized this drift in my own practice journal. The entries showed a gradual increase in “maintenance” activities and a corresponding decrease in new material. The drift was so gradual that I hadn’t noticed it happening.
Mistake Two: Measuring Success by Time Invested
“I practiced for four hours today.”
This sentence, spoken with pride, was the calling card of the non-natural. Time as achievement. Duration as dedication. The clock as scorekeeper.
Not one of the five hundred respondents who exhibited this pattern could also point to specific improvements they’d made during those hours. The hours were the accomplishment. The actual results — or lack thereof — went unmeasured.
In my consulting life, this would have been a firing offense. If a junior consultant told me they’d worked fourteen hours and couldn’t point to a specific deliverable, I’d have serious concerns about their approach. The business world, for all its flaws, understands that output matters more than input.
Yet in practice, the input-focused mindset was nearly universal among struggling performers. And the reason was psychological: time spent creates a feeling of accomplishment that insulates against the uncomfortable reality that no progress was made. It’s self-medication. You can’t feel bad about stagnation if you feel good about dedication.
Mistake Three: Saving the Hard Stuff for Last
This one was so consistent across the survey responses that it might as well be a law of human behavior. Given a choice between starting with easy material or hard material, almost everyone starts easy.
The reasoning is intuitive. Warm up. Build momentum. Get into the zone. Then, when you’re feeling good and confident, tackle the challenging material.
The problem is that “feeling good and confident” is not the same as “having peak cognitive resources.” By the time you’ve spent forty minutes on comfortable material, your focus has already begun to decline. Your willpower has been partially depleted — even by tasks that feel easy, because the act of maintaining concentration uses the same finite resource regardless of difficulty level.
The naturals did the opposite. Hard stuff first. New material first. The technique that scares you, the move that makes you fail — that goes at the top of the session when your brain is fresh and your focus is sharpest. Then, as energy naturally declines, you work backward through progressively easier material. The difficulty curve of your session mirrors the energy curve of your body.
I’d been doing it wrong for months. Starting with comfortable card work to “warm up my hands,” then attempting the difficult sleights at the end when my concentration was shot. No wonder the difficult sleights never improved.
Mistake Four: Refusing to Move On Before Mastery
“I’m not going to attempt a double somersault until my single somersault is perfect.”
This statement, or its equivalent in every discipline, was one of the most common responses in the survey. It sounds responsible. It sounds logical. It sounds like the advice every teacher gives.
It’s wrong.
If you can do a single somersault at ninety percent consistency and you refuse to attempt a double until you reach one hundred percent, you will spend an extraordinary amount of time chasing that last ten percent — time that could be spent on the double, which would paradoxically improve your single somersault faster than grinding it directly.
The survey data showed this clearly: practitioners who moved to harder material before achieving full mastery of current material progressed faster across the board. Not just on the harder material — on everything. Including the material they’d “abandoned” at ninety percent.
This was the most counterintuitive finding, and the one that met the most resistance from respondents who heard it. How can walking away from something make it better? The answer involved adaptation and myelination and the rubber band analogy — concepts I’ll explore in depth in upcoming posts. But the survey data didn’t require understanding the mechanism. The correlation was clear: early advancement correlated with faster overall progress.
Mistake Five: Believing Repetition Alone Creates Consistency
“If I just do it enough times, it’ll become consistent.”
This belief was nearly universal, and it’s nearly universally wrong. Repetition maintains existing skill levels. It does not, by itself, improve them. If the repetitions are of a technique that’s already within your comfort zone, they’re reinforcing existing neural pathways without creating new ones.
The truth is direct: the universal reason we become better at a skill is not repetition but adaptation.
Adaptation requires stress. Specifically, it requires attempting something that is beyond your current ability — something that your body and mind perceive as a challenge significant enough to trigger a response. Repeating a technique you can already do at ninety percent does not create this stress. The body has already adapted to it. Further repetitions are like lifting the same weight you’ve been lifting for months — it maintains muscle, but it doesn’t build new muscle.
The survey showed that practitioners who did fewer total repetitions but more challenging repetitions improved faster than those who did massive numbers of comfortable repetitions. Quality of difficulty trumped quantity of repetition, every time.
Mistake Six: Ignoring How Progress Actually Works
People are willing to practice hours for decades without ever taking five minutes on learning how progress actually works.
This was the meta-mistake — the mistake about mistakes. The vast majority of practitioners had never studied the science or psychology of learning. They practiced based on intuition, convention, and whatever advice they’d received from teachers who themselves had never studied how learning works.
It’s as if someone decided to build a house without ever learning about architecture or construction. They might get something that stands up, through luck or brute force. But it won’t be efficient, it won’t be optimized, and it will take far longer than necessary.
I was guilty of this myself. I had a graduate education. I had years of analytical training from consulting. But I’d never once applied that analytical capacity to understanding how practice works. I just picked up the cards and practiced, following intuition, and wondered why the results were slow.
Mistake Seven: Fear-Based Practice
This was the subtlest mistake and, in many ways, the most damaging. It emerged not from the survey directly but from the comparative observation of naturals versus non-naturals.
Struggling practitioners practiced from a position of fear. Specifically, fear of losing skills they’d already acquired. Their sessions were organized around preservation — making sure the techniques they could already do were still sharp, making sure nothing had degraded, making sure the routine still worked.
Successful practitioners practiced from a position of gain. Their sessions were organized around acquisition — what new thing can I add, what new level can I reach, what new challenge can I attempt?
The difference sounds philosophical, but its effects were concrete. Fear-based practice produces conservative sessions heavy on repetition and light on challenge. Gain-based practice produces adventurous sessions heavy on new material and tolerant of failure.
Over time, the fear-based practitioner’s skill set calcifies. They become very, very good at maintaining a fixed level. The gain-based practitioner’s skill set expands. They become progressively better because they’re always pushing into territory that demands adaptation.
The Universality Problem
What troubled me most about these seven mistakes was their universality. They weren’t specific to beginners. They weren’t specific to any discipline. They appeared across every skill level and every field the survey covered.
This meant they weren’t errors of ignorance that could be solved by information alone. They were errors of human psychology — deeply rooted in how our minds approach the discomfort of learning. We seek comfort, avoid failure, measure effort instead of results, and prioritize preservation over expansion. Not because we’re lazy or stupid, but because our cognitive architecture is wired for survival, and survival favors holding what you have over risking what you might gain.
Overcoming these patterns required more than knowing about them. It required actively fighting against instincts that had served our species well for hundreds of thousands of years. The impulse to start with what’s comfortable, to avoid failure, to measure time instead of results — these aren’t bugs in our psychology. They’re features. They just happen to be features that work against effective practice.
What I Did With the List
I printed my list of seven universal mistakes and taped it to the mirror in my hotel room. Not a metaphorical mirror — the actual bathroom mirror, where I’d see it every morning.
Then I went through my practice sessions with a checklist. Before each session, I’d review the list. During the session, I’d catch myself committing one of the seven. After the session, I’d note which ones I’d avoided and which ones had crept back in.
The first week, I caught myself making all seven in almost every session. The pull of the old patterns was enormous. Start with comfortable material? The hands reached for familiar cards before my brain could intervene. Measure by time? The clock on the hotel nightstand was always in my peripheral vision. Avoid the hard stuff? Every fiber of my being wanted to postpone the difficult technique until later.
But week by week, the checklist worked. Not perfectly — I still caught myself drifting. But the drift became shorter. The recovery became faster. The awareness became automatic.
The list of universal mistakes became my anti-curriculum. Not what to do — what to stop doing. And stopping turned out to be the most productive thing I’d ever done in a practice session.