The research finding that stopped me cold wasn’t about magic. It wasn’t about music, or business, or any of the disciplines I’d been studying. It was about figure skating.
The study compared how elite figure skaters and average figure skaters spent their practice time. Specifically, it tracked what percentage of practice time each group spent on jumps they could already land versus jumps they couldn’t.
The elite skaters spent significantly more time on jumps they could not land.
The average skaters spent significantly more time on jumps they could already land.
That’s it. That’s the finding. And when I encountered it in the “Art of Practice” material, something shifted in how I understood not just practice, but myself.
The Obvious Question I Didn’t Want to Answer
The immediate question the study raises isn’t complicated: which skater are you?
Do you spend most of your practice time on things you can already do — the routines that feel smooth, the techniques that come easily, the effects that you’ve already nailed? Or do you spend most of your practice time on the things that don’t work yet — the transitions that are rough, the sleights that fumble, the sequences where your hands don’t quite do what your brain is telling them?
I didn’t want to answer this honestly. Because I already knew the answer.
I was the average skater.
When I sat down in a hotel room for a practice session, I almost always started with something I was good at. Something that felt like progress because the execution was clean. A sequence I’d already polished to the point where I could perform it while watching television. Something that made me feel competent.
And here’s the insidious part: I didn’t think of this as wasting time. I thought of it as warming up. Or consolidating. Or maintaining performance readiness. I had excellent-sounding justifications for spending the first twenty or thirty minutes of every session on material I’d already mastered.
But the figure skating research cuts through all those justifications with surgical precision. The elite skaters and the average skaters probably had the same justifications. The same stories about warming up, about maintenance, about staying sharp. The difference wasn’t in their stories. It was in how they actually allocated their minutes.
Why We Default to What We Can Already Do
Before I beat myself up too badly, let me acknowledge why this pattern is so universal. It’s not laziness. It’s not stupidity. It’s deeply human, and it has roots in basic psychology.
Practicing what you’re good at feels good. There’s an immediate reward — the satisfaction of clean execution, the pleasure of competence, the confirmation that yes, you are in fact getting better at this. Your brain releases a little hit of satisfaction every time you execute something well.
Practicing what you’re bad at feels terrible. There’s an immediate punishment — the frustration of failure, the discomfort of incompetence, the confrontation with how far you still have to go. Your brain registers each failed attempt as a negative signal, something to be avoided.
Over time, these reward signals shape behavior without conscious awareness. You drift toward the material that feels rewarding and away from the material that feels punishing. You don’t decide to become the average skater. You gradually, unconsciously, slide into the average skater’s practice pattern because your brain is optimizing for immediate emotional reward rather than long-term skill development.
This is the same towards/away-from dynamic I’ve explored elsewhere in this series, but applied specifically to practice time allocation. Your brain is moving toward the pleasure of competence and away from the discomfort of struggle.
The result: you get really, really good at what you were already decent at. And the things you struggle with stay exactly where they were.
The Audit
After reading about the figure skaters, I decided to audit my own practice time. Not estimate it. Actually track it.
For two weeks, I logged what I practiced in each session. Not just the total time — the breakdown. How many minutes on material I could already perform versus how many minutes on material I was still developing.
The results were worse than I expected.
Across a typical sixty-minute session, I was spending roughly forty minutes on familiar material and twenty minutes on challenging material. On some sessions — particularly when I was tired or stressed from a long day of consulting work — the ratio was even more skewed. Fifty minutes of comfort, ten minutes of growth.
I was spending two-thirds of my practice time reinforcing skills I already had and one-third of my time actually building new ones.
And the twenty minutes I did spend on challenging material? They were almost always at the end of the session, when my energy and focus were lowest. The leftovers. The scraps of attention that remained after I’d used up the best of my concentration on things that didn’t need it.
I was the figure skating study in a single data point.
The Inversion
The fix was obvious in theory and painful in practice: invert the ratio.
I restructured my sessions so that the challenging material came first, when my energy and focus were highest. The familiar material — the maintenance work, the run-throughs of polished routines — got pushed to the end of the session, where it belonged. Low-demand work can survive on low-quality attention. High-demand work cannot.
The target ratio I set for myself was roughly the inverse of what I’d been doing. Forty minutes of challenging material. Twenty minutes of familiar material. Twice as much time on what I couldn’t do compared to what I could.
The first week was genuinely unpleasant. Starting every session with material that made me feel incompetent was a psychological adjustment. There was no warm, comfortable ramp-up. No easing into the session with things that felt good. Just immediate confrontation with my own limitations.
I kept wanting to “just run through” a familiar routine first. Just to get in the groove. Just to warm up my hands. The justifications piled up like snow. I had to consciously override them every single session.
But the results were undeniable. Within that first week, the challenging material started improving faster than it ever had. The simple math explains why: I was now devoting twice the time, and the best quality time, to the areas that needed growth. The adaptation mechanism was finally getting the volume and intensity of input it needed.
The Comfort Tax
I started thinking about the old ratio — forty minutes familiar, twenty minutes challenging — as a “comfort tax.” It was the price I was paying, measured in lost progress, for the emotional comfort of starting each session with things I was already good at.
Every minute spent on material below your current capacity is a minute that produces maintenance at best. It keeps what you have. It doesn’t build anything new. And while maintenance has value — you don’t want skills to decay — the proportion matters enormously.
The average figure skaters weren’t idiots. They were maintaining their existing jumps. Those jumps stayed clean. But the jumps they couldn’t land stayed unlanded. Week after week, month after month, the skills they avoided remained exactly as undeveloped as the day they decided they were too hard to focus on.
The comfort tax is invisible because you’re still “practicing.” You’re still in the room. You’re still putting in hours. By every surface measure, you’re doing the work. But the allocation of that work is systematically biased toward what’s already done and away from what still needs doing.
The Emotional Resistance
I want to be honest about something. Even after I understood the principle, even after I restructured my sessions, even after I saw the results — the emotional resistance never fully went away.
Every session, there’s a voice that says: just do the familiar stuff first. Just five minutes. It’ll feel good, you’ll get in the zone, and then you’ll tackle the hard stuff.
That voice is lying. Not maliciously — it genuinely wants me to feel good — but it’s lying about the consequences. Those five minutes of comfort become ten, become fifteen, and by the time I get to the challenging material, I’ve already burned through my best focus.
The discipline isn’t in doing the hard work. The discipline is in doing the hard work first, before the comfort work, when you have the most to give.
Some nights in a hotel room, after a twelve-hour consulting engagement, the last thing I wanted to do was start with the technique that made me feel like a fumbling beginner. I wanted to start with the sequence that made me feel like a performer. I wanted that little dopamine confirmation that I was competent.
But competence at what you’ve already mastered isn’t progress. It’s a warm blanket that keeps you at exactly the temperature you’re already at.
The Broader Pattern
The figure skating finding isn’t just about skating or magic or any single discipline. It’s about how humans allocate effort across their lives.
In consulting, I saw the same pattern constantly. Organizations would invest resources in optimizing their existing strengths rather than addressing their weaknesses. They’d double down on what was already working — their “landed jumps” — and avoid the hard, uncomfortable work of developing capabilities they lacked.
The companies that grew fastest were the ones that invested disproportionately in their gaps. Not exclusively — you still need to maintain your strengths — but disproportionately. They were the elite skaters of the business world, spending more time on the jumps they couldn’t land.
In personal development, the pattern is everywhere. People read books on topics they already understand. They attend conferences for industries they already know. They network with people who already share their views. Comfort masquerading as growth.
The figure skating study is a mirror, and most of us don’t like what we see in it.
My Current Ratio
I’ve settled into a practice allocation that works for me, refined over many months of hotel room sessions.
First ten to fifteen minutes: specific warm-up, getting hands loose and responsive. This is functional preparation, not comfort practice. I have a targeted warm-up sequence that prepares my hands for the specific challenging material I’m about to work on. No browsing through familiar routines.
Next thirty to thirty-five minutes: the hard stuff. The techniques I haven’t mastered. The sequences that still require conscious effort. The material that, if I’m honest, I would rather avoid. This is where nearly all the growth happens, and it gets the lion’s share of my best attention.
Final fifteen to twenty minutes: maintenance and run-throughs. Polished material that needs to stay sharp. This is where the familiar routines live — at the end, where they can survive on whatever energy remains.
The ratio is roughly sixty percent challenging material, twenty percent warm-up, twenty percent maintenance. A complete inversion of where I started.
What Changes When You Track It
If nothing else in this post resonates, try the audit. Just for one week. Write down what you practiced and for how long. Be specific. Then categorize each block of time: was this material I can already perform, or material I’m still developing?
The numbers will tell you which skater you are. And if you’re the average skater — which most of us are, because most of us are human and humans seek comfort — the numbers will tell you exactly where your missing progress went.
It didn’t vanish. It wasn’t stolen by bad genetics or limited talent. It was traded away, minute by minute, session by session, for the emotional comfort of practicing what you already know how to do.
The elite figure skaters aren’t elite because they have better bodies or more natural talent. They’re elite because they spend their practice time differently. They invest their minutes where the returns are highest — in the jumps they can’t land yet.
The same opportunity exists for anyone who picks up a deck of cards, a guitar, a paintbrush, or any other tool of creative expression. The minutes are there. The question is where you spend them.