Tag Archives: Practice

Repetition Without Repetition

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I just finished spending a wonderful week at Cisco Live EMEA and getting to catch up with some of the best people in the industry. I got to chat with trainers like Orhan Ergun and David Bombal and see how they’re continuing to embrace the need for people in the networking community to gain knowledge and training. It also made me think about a concept I recently heard about that turns out to be a perfect analogy to my training philosophy even though it’s almost 70 years old.

Practice Makes Perfect

Repetition without repetition. The idea seems like a tautology at first. How can I repeat something without repeating it. I’m sure that the people in 1967 that picked up the book by Soviet neurophysiologist Nikolai Aleksandrovitsch Bernstein were just as confused. Why should you do things over and over again if not to get good at performing the task or learning the skill?

The key in this research from Bernstein lay in how the practice happens. In this particular case he looked at blacksmiths to see how they used hammers to strike the pieces they were working on. The most accurate of his test subjects didn’t just perform the same movements over and over again. Instead, they had some variability in their skill that allowed them to be more accurate or efficient over time. They weren’t just going through the motions, as it were. They were adapting their motions to the need at the moment. This allowed them to adjust their aim if the piece had moved or needed a lighter touch in an area that was thinned too quickly.

Bernstein said this about the way that the blacksmiths practiced their art:

“The process of practice towards the achievement of new motor habits essentially consists in the gradual success of a search for optimal motor solutions to the appropriate problems. Because of this, practice, when properly undertaken, does not consist in repeating the means of solution of a motor problem time after time, but in the process of solving this problem again and again by techniques which we changed and perfected from repetition to repetition. It is already apparent here that, in many cases, ‘practice is a particular type of repetition without repetition’…”

The quote above illustrates a big shift in thinking for people who play sports or perform some kind of task. Instead of merely repeating the movements over and over again until perfection (the ‘means of the solution’) you should instead focus on solving the problem over and over again and adapting your skill to that end. It sounds silly and somewhat pedantic, but the key is in the shift of thinking. For basketball players, it’s not about perfecting your spin move to get around a defender. It’s about understanding the need to get around the defender and how best to accomplish that for different kinds of people defending you.

Avoiding Autopilot

Most of the content you’ll see around the concept of repetition without repetition is for sports players practicing skills. However, I think the concept extends perfectly to the IT certification space and troubleshooting skillset as well. There are a number of important things that we need to learn in order to do our jobs or earn a specialization but we need to remember that the goal is to solve problems and show mastery, not to memorize commands and perform them like a simple batch file.

Here’s a perfect example that I’m very guilty of doing. When you log into a Cisco router to do something, what do you normally do first when you get to the CLI prompt? You almost always need to be in privileged EXEC mode, right? That’s the enable command. When we want to configure something on the router we usually have to be in the router configuration mode, which is the configure terminal command. So far, so good, right? Most of you have already picked up on the fact that you can shorten those commands to save time typing out the whole name, which is an important skill to have when you’re configuring a series of devices or trying to do it in a short timeframe. So enable, configure terminal instead becomes en, conf t. It’s like muscle memory at this point.

How many times have you logged into router to check the routing table and accidentally typed in en, conf t from muscle memory only to remember that the routing table has to be displayed from EXEC mode, not configuration mode? You chide yourself for typing in conf t and back out to look at the table. But what you’ve really done is shown the power and drawbacks of repetition. If you spend hours upon hours typing in the same commands over and over again you will type them in the same way every time. So much so, in fact, that you forget that you’re doing it until you realize you put something in that you shouldn’t. You knew when you logged in that you wanted to display the routing table. You knew that was available in EXEC mode. And yet your brain and fingers automatically typed the same commends you always type when you log into the router.

The idea of repetition without repetition says that we need to consider the how of solving a problem and the skills needed above and beyond the simple skills themselves. Sure, there may only be one or two commands the achieve a desired output or effect but we should know how the both impact the performance of the device or how they can impact the outcome of a situation. This is especially important for exams that like to restrict your ability to use specific commands or are written to direct you in a specific line of thinking. Anyone who has ever taken the CCIE lab exam knows how this works. They restrict you from using common commands or give you a question with two possible answers only to limit that to one with a later requirement. The test asks you to configure something in an earlier section and then gives you a task that can undo that configuration if you’re not aware of how it interacts with everything else. If you’ve ever created a routing redistribution loop on accident you know what that feels like.

The Indictment of AI

In a way, repetition without repetition is the key of what makes a person an apt problem solver. By approaching problems with a mindset and not just a skillset you open your world to new possibilities and considerations. You know there is more than one way to skin a cat, as the old saying goes. You’re smarter than an artificial intelligence, which only works within a set of bounds with skills and apparent intelligence that repeats what it’s told or uses a very narrow focus every time to provide consistent results.

Computer programs and algorithms are dumb because they will solve the problem the same way each time they are executed. People will solve the problem and then start analyzing the results to find new, better, and faster ways to implement solutions. That’s the heart of learning. It’s not just performing the subtasks of the skill to perfection every time. It’s about learning how to implement them in a better way each time and arrive at better solutions to problems with the variables are changed. It’s why the human mind that has been adapted for centuries and millennia to look for patterns can be tricked into adapting those patterns to new concepts and made to “grow up” by learning over time to adjust to new inputs or fresh data. That, more than anything, is why repetition without repetition makes us better than the AI we’re programming to eclipse us.

Tom’s Take

When I first heard of this concept I thought it was some new idea from sports science that was borne from modern research techniques. I was shocked to learn it was discovered before I was born and has roots in some of the oldest trades we can think of. What it proves is that the human mind and body are very wonderful things that react perfectly when challenged in the right way. The brain will adapt and overcome when presented with new inputs. The way we grow and improve ourselves is not wrote memorization or continuous skill repetition. Instead, if we internalize the importance of the outcome over the means of getting there we will find ourselves smarter and more able to be flexible when new challenges come our way.

Practice Until You Can’t Get It Wrong

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One of the things that I spend a lot of my time doing it teaching and training. Not the deeply technical stuff like any one of training programs out there or even the legion of folks that are doing entry-level education on sites like Youtube. Instead, I spend a lot of my time bringing new technologies to the fore and discussing how they impact everyone. I also spend a lot of time with youth and teaching them skills.

One of the things that I’ve learned over the years is that it’s important to not only learn something but to reinforce it as well. How much we practice is just as important as how we learn. We’re all a little guilty of doing things just enough to be proficient without truly mastering a skill.

Hours of Fun

You may have heard of the rule proposed by Malcolm Gladwell that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. There’s been a lot of research debunking this “rule of thumb”. In fact it turns out that the way you practice and your predisposition to how you learn has a lot do to with the process as well.

When I’m teaching youth, I see them start a new skill and keep going until they get their first success. It could be tying a knot or setting up a tent or some other basic skill. Usually, with whatever it is, they get it right and then decide they are proficient in the skill. And that’s the end of it until they need to be tested on it or something forces them to use it later.

For me, the proficiency aspect of basic skills is maddening. We teach people to do things like tying knots or programming switch ports but we don’t encourage them to keep practicing. We accept that proficiency is enough. Worse yet, we hope that the way they will gain expertise is by repetition of the skill. We don’t set the expectation of continued practice.

That’s where the offhanded Gladwell comment above really comes from. The length of time may have been completely arbitrary but the reality is that you can’t really master something until you’ve done it enough that the skill becomes second nature. Imagine someone riding a bicycle for the first time. If they stopped when they were able to pedal the bike they’d never be able to ride it well enough to maneuver in traffic.

Likewise, we can’t rely on simple proficiency for other tasks either. If we just accept that an operations person just learns VLAN configuration once and then we hope they’ll know it well enough that they can do it again later we’re going to either be frustrated when they have to keep looking up the commands for the task or, worse yet, when they bring down the network because they didn’t remember that you needed to use the add keyword on a trunk port and they wipe out a chunk of the network core.

Right vs. Wrong

For all those reasons above I ask my students to take things a little further. Rather than just doing something until you have an initial success I ask them to practice until they have it ingrained into their motor pathways. Put more simply:

Don’t practice until you get it right. Practice until you can’t get it wrong.

The shift in thinking helps people understand the importance of repeated practice. Getting it right is one thing. Understanding all the possible ways something can be done or every conceivable situation is something entirely different. Sure, you can configure a VLAN. Can you do it on every switch? Do you know what order the commands need to be done in? What happens if you switch them? Do you know what happens when you enable two contradictory features?

Obviously there are things you’re not going to need to practice this much all the time. One of my favorites is the people in CCIE study groups that spend way more time working on things like BGP leak maps or the various ways that one could configure QOS on a frame relay circuit. Are these important things to know? Yes. Are they more important to know than basic layer 2/3 protocols or the interactions of OSPF and BGP when redistributing? No.

Tom’s Take

When I was younger, I watched the Real Ghostbusters cartoon. One of the episodes featured Winston asking Egon if he could read Summerian. His response? “In my sleep, underwater, and in the dark. Of course I can read Summerian.”

Practice the basics until you understand them. Don’t miss a beat and make sure you have what you need. But don’t stop there. Keep going until you can’t possibly forget how to do something. That’s how you know you’ve mastered it. In your sleep, underwater, and in dark. Practice until you can’t get it wrong.

Fast Friday Thoughts from the Woods

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I’m at camp this week helping put on the second weekend of the Last Frontier Council Wood Badge course which is my idea of a vacation. I’m learning a lot, teaching a lot more, and having fun. But that does’t mean I’m not working too. Lots of fun conversations that make me recall the way people consume information, communicate what they know, and all too often overlook the important things they take for granted.

  • Why is IT one of the few disciplines that expects people to come in fully trained and do the job instead of learning while doing it? Is that because hiring managers don’t want to train people? Or is it because senior people are less likely to impart knowledge to protect their jobs? I don’t have a good answer but I know what the result looks like and it’s not something that’s positive, either for the people doing the job or how it’s perceived outside of IT.
  • There is a ton of value in doing something for real instead of just planning it and calling it good. DR plans need to be tested. Network changes need to be mocked up. No matter what kind of critical thing you’ll be doing you need to try it for real instead of just putting it on paper and hoping that it works. In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
  • Don’t forget to commit your knowledge to paper at some point in your career. You may know everything under the sun but when you’re not available you will be missed. You know more than you realize and you need to make sure that others benefit from what you’re capable of helping with. Those that hold the knowledge only have the power when they share it. Keeping it to yourself only hurts those that can benefit. Use your currency effectively.

Tom’s Take

These questions don’t have answers. They are designed to make you think about how you do things and what you can do to leave a legacy for the people that come behind you. Don’t be the story that everyone tells about that guy they hated. Be the inspiration for those that want to be like you in the future.

How Long Should You Practice

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A reporter once asked boxing legend Muhammad Ali how many sit-ups he did each day. I’m sure the reporter wasn’t expecting Ali’s answer. Ali replied with:

I don’t know. I don’t start counting them until it hurts. Those are the only ones that count. That’s what makes you a champion.”

Ali knew that counting things is just a numbers game. Five hundred poor sit-ups don’t count as much a fifty done the right way. With any practice that you do the only things that count are the things that teach your something or that push you to be better.

Don’t Practice Until It’s Right

People used to ask me how long I would spend at night studying for the CCIE lab. I told them I usually spent between five and seven hours depending on what I was studying. Sometimes those people would say things like “I’m not talking about setup time. I’m talking about actual lab work.” I always countered by making them explain why the setup isn’t part of the “real” work. That’s usually when they went quiet.

It’s far too easy to fall into the trap of overlooking things that you think are unimportant. A task you’ve done a hundred times is no big deal until you do it wrong the next time. Like Ali above, the things you do that require no effort don’t count. If you’re practicing a skill for a certification or a lab you need to put the same effort into it every time to ensure you’re doing it correctly. Lack of attention means you are doing it without gaining something from it.

I spend a lot of my time teaching things to people all over the place. I teach IT and networking skills to professionals. I teach outdoor skills to scouts of all ages. I teach merit badges and other things to a variety of youth. And I teach my kids life skills they will need. Every one of these lessons comes with instruction in the little details that matter. Every lesson also includes guidance that it needs to be practiced properly until it’s right. And then some.

Until You Can’t Get It Wrong

I tell my students and kids all the time, “Don’t practice until you get it right. Practice until you can’t get it wrong.” The level of involvement that it takes to get past the part where something finally works up to the level where it works every time is as wide as the gap at the lower end of the spectrum.

Too often people are content to work on something until they get it once. Whether it’s tying a knot or programming a router interface or even cooking a grilled cheese sandwich. Once you’ve done it right once you’re done with learning, right? Most of you are already shaking your head because you know that’s not right.

Once you get it right the first time you’ve already made a list of all the wrong ways to do something and you avoid them in the future. However, that list doesn’t include the entirety of all the wrong ways to do a thing. Amateurs make somewhat predictable mistakes because they’re working from the same basic knowledge. It’s when someone says they know what they’re doing that the real crazy stuff starts coming out of the woodwork.

Once you’ve practiced a skill you need to keep going. You need to work a variety of different angles to make sure you’ve covered all the ways you could get it wrong. If you’re tying a knot you need to practice with different kinds of ropes or in different positions. If there are two ways to tie something, practice them both. You don’t want to be an expert at a clove hitch over the end of a pole only to find out you have to tie it around the middle with no way to use the loop method you have memorized.

In IT, we lab things up to make sure we understand them. For these labs, try out the things in wrong ways. Click buttons before you’re supposed to. Put the wrong numbers in the field. See how the system will try to correct your errors. Maybe it doesn’t even bother? It’s easy to figure out you typed something in wrong when you hear a bell and see a message. It’s harder to troubleshoot when you don’t see anything right away and it all falls over later.

The extra practice above and beyond the first success is just like Muhammad Ali’s sit-ups. The hard ones count. The tasks that stretch your mind are the ones that build your skillset. You can’t give up when the answer isn’t right at your fingertips. Going that extra mile is the key to making yourself a better professional in whatever you do.

Tom’s Take

As we wind down 2020 we’re all looking to be better at things. Hobbies, skills, or professional talents are all calling to us to work on in whatever down time we have available to us. Make that practice count. Work hard to get it right every time. If you want to learn to make hollandaise sauce or write a novel or do a forward flip you have to keep practicing even after your success. Get to the point where you have no other choice but to get it right every single time. That’s the perfect amount of practice you need. Anything less counts as much as Muhammad Ali’s sit-ups before they start hurting.