It occurred to me today that practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect.

W. E. Hickson and Thomas H. Palmer are credited with being responsible for the phrase, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” Is it any wonder that these two were authors in the field of education?!?! But, despite having heard that phrase many, many times during my childhood, and having uttered it many, many more times in my classroom, I think it bears some deeper thought.

The phrase is an ode to persistence, of course, especially in the face of failure. Persistence, and the lack of it in society, result, in my opinion, from our tendency as a society to seek the easiest paths. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t learn how rewarding it can be to try something hard, to persist at it and to wrestle with it, and then to eventually succeed, until well into my adult life. Probably about the time that I started questioning some of what’s going on in the world around me.

I see this lack of persistence in my classroom all the time. As a teacher, I am often frustrated by students who seem to lack the persistence to succeed at anything that is harder than a “gimme”. Just this year, I began teaching a very rigorous course in Computer Science and Coding, and my students are very often incapable of persisting toward success. After only a modicum of effort, they throw up their hands and look at me like, “I’m not working any harder than I have, so I guess this is over.”

So frustrating!

One of my favorites quotes about persistence is the one from Thomas Edison: “Many of life’s failures are [people] who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” Edison, one of the famed inventors in America’s history, is reported to have had a monumental level of persistence. And, how many times have we ended up being successful at something with the thought running in the back of our head, “I’ll get it with just a couple more tries.”

However, we’d be foolish to think that the only thing that needs to happen in order for a person to be successful is that they would try at something X number of times. If I knock my head against the cinder block wall once and I hear my mother’s voice in my head saying, “If at first you don’t succeed…”, it doesn’t change the fact that knocking my head against that wall 100,000 more times isn’t going to bring down the wall.

So, instead, we alter our approaches. We tweak. I stop using my head against that wall and start using a tack hammer. And when I notice that a tack hammer does a better job, but still isn’t cutting it, I use a sledge hammer or a wrecking ball. These result in the success as much as the persistence does.

So, there’s a triad then –> an inter-connectivity between persistence and improvement and success. Practice doesn’t make perfect, but perfect practice will, eventually.

So, why does any of this matter? Why is it important for us to know?

Well, for one thing, we need to stop doing things the same way that we’ve always done them if we aren’t getting to success. It’s the tweaking that helps where sheer persistence fails. How many times should we knock our head against the cinder block wall before we alter our approach? Ten times? A hundred times? If you take intelligence out of the equation (intelligence that tells us that it is not possible to knock down a cinder block wall with one’s forehead), even a moron should be able to determine, after a good old college try, that change is necessary.

Now, don’t get me wrong on this, we ought not change our approaches to things without a proper trail run at success. Like Mr. Edison reminds us, our breakthrough might be just around the corner. But, we also have to be realistic. That voice inside that says, “This isn’t working” is our notification that a different approach might be in order, especially as that voice gets louder.

And, a fear of change should never be a determiner when it comes to whether or not we change tack.

If persistence and improvements, when paired together, lead to success, and the vast majority of people in our society, have something that they want to be successful at, why are more people realizing those goals.

A final example before I go:

I will never forget a conversation that I had once with a student of mine named Andre. Andre and I would always go back and forth about how important it was for him to pay attention in class, for him to do his work, for him to try his best to understand the material. Eventually, one day, as class let out, I held Andre behind and I asked him what his plan was for life, if he was so sure that he wasn’t going to be needing an education. Andre told me that he was going to be going to college to play basketball, and then he was going to end up going pro.

So, I fostered this conversation with Andre by asking him questions like, “How often do you practice your free throw shooting?” and “How many hours do you spend on the fundamentals every week? and “Do you practice year-round, or only during the basketball season?” It occurred to me very quickly that Andre wasn’t a persistent basketball player.

What should you start to become persistent at doing?