In the consulting world, there’s a famous distinction attributed to Michael Gerber: the difference between working in your business and working on your business.
Working in your business means doing the day-to-day tasks. Serving customers, writing reports, managing staff. It’s necessary work, but it doesn’t change the business. At the end of the day, the business is exactly what it was at the beginning — just a day older.
Working on your business means stepping back and examining the system itself. The strategy, the structure, the processes. It’s the work that changes the business from the outside, that transforms it into something different and better.
“Art of Practice” made the same distinction about practice, and when I read it, the consulting parallel hit me like a freight train: “We are going to work on our practice, not in our practice.”
I’d been working in my practice for months. Sitting down, picking up cards, running through techniques, logging hours. Doing the work. And at the end of each week, my practice was exactly what it had been at the beginning — just a week older. Same approach. Same structure. Same results.
I’d never once stepped back and examined the system itself.
The Five-Minute Revolution
The framing made me feel simultaneously enlightened and embarrassed: people are willing to practice hours for decades without ever taking five minutes to learn how progress actually works.
Five minutes. That’s what I hadn’t invested. Thousands of hours of practice, but not five minutes spent examining whether those hours were structured correctly.
The embarrassment came from my professional identity. I was a strategy consultant. My entire career was built on helping organizations step back from their daily operations and examine the system. I was paid handsomely to do for companies what I’d never done for my own practice.
The irony was almost physically painful.
What “Working On” Actually Looks Like
Working on your practice means asking questions that have nothing to do with the skills you’re practicing. Not “How do I improve this technique?” but “How do I improve how I practice this technique?”
These are fundamentally different questions. The first one leads to mechanical adjustments — finger position, timing, angle. The second one leads to strategic adjustments — session structure, energy allocation, difficulty sequencing.
Here are the questions I started asking after this reframe:
What do I work on first, and why? The answer revealed that I was defaulting to comfortable material because it felt good, not because it was strategically optimal.
How do I decide when to move to harder material? The answer revealed that I was waiting for one hundred percent mastery, which was keeping me stuck on material that no longer challenged me.
How do I know when a session has been productive? The answer revealed that I was using time spent as my metric, which told me nothing about actual improvement.
What do I do when I encounter a mistake? The answer revealed that I was responding with frustration and speed, rather than curiosity and analysis.
These questions took about ten minutes to formulate and answer honestly. The answers exposed a practice system that was fundamentally flawed — not in its execution but in its architecture.
The Biggest Leverage I’ve Ever Found
Strategy is the part of your practice where you can typically get the biggest returns for the smallest time and energy invested. It sets the entire context of your choices on what you will spend hours, months, or even years in your future.
I’ve experienced this leverage in consulting many times. A single strategic insight — this market is dying, or this customer segment is more profitable than you think, or this product line should be killed — can redirect years of organizational effort and produce more value than a thousand incremental improvements combined.
The same leverage exists in practice. One strategic adjustment — putting hard material first instead of last — redirects every session from that point forward. It’s not a one-time improvement. It’s a permanent structural change that improves every future hour of practice.
The compounding effect is what makes it feel almost unfair. A strategic change to your practice approach doesn’t just make today’s session better. It makes tomorrow’s session better. And next week’s. And next month’s. The improvement accumulates because the structural change is permanent, affecting every subsequent session until you change it again.
Compare this to a mechanical improvement, which affects only the specific technique it addresses. Getting your pinky position right on one sleight improves that one sleight. Restructuring your session to put the hardest material first improves everything you practice in every session for the rest of your career.
The System Behind the System
There’s a deeper layer to “working on your practice” that took me longer to see.
It’s not just about restructuring your sessions. It’s about understanding the principles that govern learning itself — adaptation, stress, energy management, cognitive bias. These principles form the foundation that any good practice strategy must be built on.
Without understanding adaptation, you can’t know why practicing harder material improves easier material. Without understanding energy management, you can’t know why session structure matters. Without understanding cognitive bias, you can’t see the invisible forces pushing you toward comfortable, unproductive patterns.
The reading I’d been doing provided this foundation. It explained the why behind the what — the scientific and psychological principles that make certain practice strategies effective and others counterproductive.
That reading was itself an act of working on my practice rather than in it. I was spending time understanding the system instead of running the system. And that understanding, once acquired, permanently improved every future session.
The Resistance
Working on your practice feels wrong. It feels like procrastination. Like avoiding the real work.
When I sat in my hotel room reading about practice methodology instead of actually practicing, a voice in my head kept saying: “You’re wasting time. Put down the book and pick up the cards. You should be practicing.”
This resistance is powerful and, I think, nearly universal. We’ve been trained to believe that practice means doing. Hands moving. Reps counting. Sweat forming. Sitting and thinking about how to practice doesn’t match any of those signals. It looks like doing nothing.
But doing nothing strategically is more valuable than doing something blindly. A pilot who spends thirty minutes studying weather patterns and flight routes before takeoff isn’t procrastinating — they’re doing the work that makes the flight successful. A surgeon who spends an hour reviewing imaging and planning the procedure before making the first cut isn’t wasting time — they’re doing the work that makes the surgery safe.
Strategic thinking before action isn’t procrastination. It’s professionalism. It’s the difference between working with intention and working with inertia.
The Practical Framework
Here’s how I now implement “working on my practice” in concrete terms.
Before each practice session, I spend three to five minutes in what I call the strategy pause. I don’t touch the cards. I sit and answer three questions:
One: What is the single most important thing I need to improve right now? Not the most comfortable thing. Not the thing that’s next on some arbitrary list. The thing that, if improved, would have the biggest impact on my overall performance.
Two: What will I do first? The answer must be the thing from question one. No warm-up exceptions. No ease-in period.
Three: What will I measure? Not time. Something concrete — “I’ll attempt this technique thirty times and record my success rate.” A number I can compare to yesterday’s number.
After each session, I spend two to three minutes in what I call the strategy review. Again, no cards. Just reflection:
What actually happened? Did I follow the plan? Where did I deviate, and why? Did my focus decline? When? What would I do differently next time?
This entire process — strategy pause plus strategy review — takes less than ten minutes out of my practice time. The investment is trivial. The return is enormous, because it ensures that every minute of actual practice is directed by intention rather than habit.
Why Winners Have Systems
There’s a distinction that resonated with my consulting experience: dreamers have goals, but winners have systems.
Goals are endpoints. I want to master this technique. I want to perform a flawless show. I want to be good enough to impress at Vulpine Creations events. These are fine as aspirations, but they don’t tell you what to do on a Tuesday evening in a hotel room in Vienna.
Systems are processes. I start with the hardest material. I practice in focused bursts. I measure by results, not time. I advance at ninety percent. These are actionable regardless of the specific goal, and they produce results independent of motivation, mood, or inspiration.
The shift from goals to systems was the shift from working in my practice to working on it. Goals kept me practicing. Systems made my practice effective.
And the beauty of a system is that it’s self-correcting. When the system isn’t producing results, you examine the system and adjust it. You don’t just work harder within a broken framework — you fix the framework. This is working on your practice in its purest form.
The Ongoing Work
Working on your practice isn’t a one-time event. It’s a continuous process. The strategy that works today may not work next month, because your skill level will have changed and the optimal approach will have shifted with it.
What I practice first changes as my weaknesses change. How long my focused bursts last changes as my cognitive endurance develops. What constitutes “ninety percent mastery” changes as my standards evolve.
The system itself must evolve. And the work of evolving it — examining it, questioning it, adjusting it — is the ongoing process of working on your practice.
I still catch myself defaulting to working in my practice. It’s comfortable. It’s tangible. Hands moving, cards flipping, techniques repeating. The pull of doing is always stronger than the pull of thinking about doing.
But every time I resist that pull and spend five minutes thinking strategically about my approach, those five minutes pay for themselves many times over in the quality of the session that follows. The leverage is real. The asymmetry between strategic thinking and mechanical execution is real.
And the distinction between working in your practice and working on it is the most important distinction I’ve ever learned about getting better at anything.