For years, I had the equation backward.
I thought: repetition leads to improvement. Do something enough times, and you’ll get better at it. Practice makes perfect. Ten thousand hours. Grind, grind, grind.
This belief felt axiomatic. It was baked into every piece of advice I’d ever received about learning, from elementary school teachers to corporate training programs. Want to get better? Practice more. Simple. Obvious. Universal.
Except it didn’t work. Or rather, it worked up to a point — roughly ninety percent proficiency — and then stopped. And no amount of additional repetition moved the needle past that point.
The “Art of Practice” author identified the real mechanism: “Progress is the result of your body’s or brain’s adaptation to certain demands.” Not repetition. Adaptation. Repetition is merely one way to trigger adaptation, and it stops working the moment the demands become familiar.
Understanding this distinction — repetition versus adaptation — was the most important conceptual shift in my entire practice journey.
The Adaptation Mechanism
Adaptation is a biological process. When your body or brain encounters a demand that exceeds its current capacity, it responds by building new capacity. Muscles grow stronger after being stressed beyond their current strength. Neural pathways become more efficient after being challenged beyond their current speed. The immune system develops antibodies after encountering pathogens it hasn’t seen before.
The key word is “exceeds.” Adaptation requires a gap between current capacity and current demand. If the demand matches the capacity — if the challenge is at the level you can already handle — there’s no signal for adaptation. The system is in equilibrium. Nothing changes.
This is why repetition at the same difficulty level eventually stops producing results. The first hundred repetitions of a new technique are challenging. The demand exceeds capacity. Adaptation fires. Improvement happens. But by the five-hundredth repetition, the demand no longer exceeds capacity. The technique is within the comfort zone. The adaptation mechanism has nothing to respond to.
“Practice Like a Pro” framed it through the lens of athletic performance: when a weightlifter can comfortably lift a certain weight, continuing to lift that same weight produces maintenance, not growth. Growth requires increasing the weight — creating a new gap between capacity and demand.
Where Repetition Fits
This doesn’t mean repetition is useless. It means repetition serves a different function than we typically think.
Repetition consolidates. It takes the gains produced by adaptation and locks them in through myelination — the biological process that wraps neural pathways in insulating material, making signals travel faster and more reliably. Each repetition of a pathway strengthens the myelin sheath, making the pathway more automatic and consistent.
But repetition doesn’t create. It doesn’t build new capacity. It stabilizes existing capacity. It turns conscious effort into unconscious habit. It paves roads that have already been roughed in by the adaptation process.
The confusion arises because both processes feel like “practice.” From the outside, a musician playing scales to consolidate existing skill looks identical to a musician playing scales to develop new skill. The activity is the same. The internal mechanism is completely different.
When I understood this, I started categorizing my practice differently. Not by what I was doing, but by what mechanism I was engaging. Am I adapting — working on something that exceeds my current capacity? Or am I consolidating — reinforcing something I can already do? Both are necessary. But only adaptation creates progress. Consolidation maintains it.
The Workout Analogy That Made It Click
A weight-room analogy perfectly crystallized the distinction for me.
Imagine two people in a gym. Person A lifts thirty kilograms every day. Same weight, same reps, same routine, month after month. Person B starts at thirty kilograms but adds weight whenever the current load feels manageable — thirty-two, thirty-five, thirty-eight, and so on.
After six months, Person A can still lift thirty kilograms. Comfortably, reliably, without difficulty. But thirty-five is still a struggle. The same struggle it was six months ago. All those months of consistent effort maintained the existing capacity without building new capacity.
Person B, after six months, is lifting fifty kilograms. And thirty — the weight that both started with — is now trivially easy. Not because Person B practiced thirty more than Person A. Because Person B created consistent adaptation pressure by increasing the demand, and the adaptation mechanism built new capacity in response.
I had been Person A in my magic practice. Repeating the same techniques at the same difficulty level, expecting the repetition itself to produce improvement. The repetition was producing consistency at the current level — which felt like progress because the consistency was comforting — but it wasn’t building new capacity.
My Hotel Room Experiment
I tested this directly over four weeks in a sequence of hotel rooms across three countries.
For two weeks, I practiced a card sleight the traditional way: repetition at my current ability level. I tracked my success rate daily. Starting point: seventy-eight percent. After two weeks of daily thirty-minute sessions: eighty-two percent. Four percentage points in two weeks. Not nothing, but slow.
For the next two weeks, I changed the approach. Instead of practicing the sleight at my current level, I attempted it at roughly one and a half times my normal speed and with added complexity. My success rate at this elevated difficulty was abysmal — maybe thirty percent. But I wasn’t measuring success at the hard level. I was using the hard level to trigger adaptation.
After those two weeks, I tested the original sleight at normal speed and complexity. Success rate: eighty-nine percent. Seven percentage points in two weeks — nearly double the gain from the repetition-only approach. And the practice sessions were shorter because the intense adaptation work was more mentally demanding, which meant I hit my focus limit faster.
Less time, more progress. Because I was engaging the right mechanism.
The Hierarchy of Practice Activities
Based on everything I’ve learned, I now think of practice activities in a hierarchy based on their adaptation potential:
At the bottom: repetition of comfortable material. This maintains existing skills and provides consolidation through myelination, but creates zero adaptation pressure. It’s necessary but shouldn’t dominate practice time.
In the middle: repetition of material at the edge of current ability. This creates moderate adaptation pressure — the technique is hard enough to trigger some improvement but not hard enough to create dramatic gains. This is where most people’s practice lives, and it’s why most people’s progress is slow but steady.
At the top: attempts at material significantly beyond current ability. This creates maximum adaptation pressure. The failure rate is high, the discomfort is real, and the adaptation signal is strong. This is where the fastest improvement happens, and it’s where almost nobody spends enough time.
The ideal distribution, based on my experience: roughly fifty percent at the top of the hierarchy, thirty percent in the middle, and twenty percent at the bottom. This ensures maximum adaptation pressure during the most focused part of the session, moderate pressure during the middle, and consolidation at the end when energy is lower.
Most people practice with the inverse distribution: fifty percent at the bottom, thirty percent in the middle, twenty percent at the top. They spend most of their time on comfortable material and only venture into truly challenging territory occasionally. The result is slow progress punctuated by frustration when the comfortable material doesn’t improve.
Why Adaptation Feels Wrong
There’s a reason most people default to repetition over adaptation. Repetition feels productive. Adaptation feels like failure.
When you repeat something you can already do, the experience is pleasant. Cards move smoothly. Techniques land correctly. The session feels successful. You leave practice feeling good about yourself.
When you attempt something beyond your current ability, the experience is unpleasant. Cards fumble. Techniques fail. The session feels like a disaster. You leave practice feeling frustrated and uncertain.
Every instinct says: the pleasant session was more productive. Every instinct is wrong.
The pleasant session reinforced existing capacity. The unpleasant session built new capacity. The frustration you felt was the feeling of adaptation happening — of your nervous system being pushed beyond its comfort zone and responding by building new pathways.
I had to learn to reframe failure as signal. When a technique fails during practice, it means the demand exceeds current capacity. That gap is precisely what triggers adaptation. Without the failure, there’s no gap. Without the gap, there’s no adaptation. Without adaptation, there’s no progress.
Failure during practice isn’t the opposite of progress. It’s the prerequisite.
The Consulting Connection
In my consulting work, I see the same dynamic in organizational learning. Companies that repeatedly execute their existing playbook maintain their current performance level. Companies that attempt projects slightly beyond their current capability — that stretch into new markets, new technologies, new approaches — build new organizational capacity.
The companies that grow fastest are the ones most comfortable with productive failure. They try things that don’t work, learn from the attempt, and build the new capacity that the stretch demanded. The companies that stagnate are the ones that perfect their existing operations without ever stretching beyond them.
The parallel is exact. Repetition of the current playbook is organizational maintenance. Stretching into new territory is organizational adaptation. Both are necessary. Only adaptation produces growth.
The Daily Question
I now start every practice session with a single question: what am I doing today that I can’t currently do?
If the answer is “nothing” — if every technique on my practice list is within my current ability — I know the session will be maintenance, not growth. The consolidation is valuable, but it shouldn’t be the whole session. Something in the session needs to exceed my capacity. Something needs to trigger the adaptation mechanism.
Usually, this means starting with the hardest material. The technique I can only land thirty or forty percent of the time. The one that makes my hands feel clumsy and my brain feel overloaded. The one where failure is more common than success.
That technique — the one that feels the worst to practice — is doing the most for my development. Because it’s the one creating the gap. The gap that adaptation exists to close.
Repetition is the vehicle. Adaptation is the engine. Without the engine, the vehicle goes nowhere — no matter how many miles you log.