Importance of practice

When I wrote about ten thousand hours concept ,many friends  shared it with me that this is the same as  practising for as many hours as mentioned for becoming better than others.This is true, but at the same time one more thing should be analysed and understood that practice is not  necessarily to compete with others or trying to be better than them but making oneself better than before. When we talk of outliers( the ones who have extraordinary things which others could not do) than again it should be clear that anyone who has done extraordinarily well did not really to do better than others but because he/she had a desire and will to achieve that for self satisfaction or happiness.There might be some exceptional cases which might prove otherwise and the one which I remember is that of the great Acharya Chanakya who made Chandragupta to work that hard so that the Guru could take the revenge of the insult he had been subjected to.The other case may be of Guru Dronacharya who also dedicated his whole life to make his Shishyas, the best.
When the word practice comes to mind then one more thing makes you to think and that is, should practice be considered something being repeated every day or this is something different? I think practice is the medium or the essence to try new ways of doing things and when I say new ways, that means better ways to explore and perform and whenever this side of the practice is taken then new things are discovered or created. Take the case of the scientists and you will find that they are the ones who keep practising for long hours and this practice for them becomes the experiment.Consider another example of the players be it the Hockey players, basketball, cricket ,chess, football or any other game,and again it is found that the practice  sessions are used to do something different every day.So the word practice should not be confined to only repeating the things but understanding and doing the same thing with a little difference and novelty.
For doing this, a person should have patience and clear objective to be achieved and for patience one has to have time which is becoming a problem for most of the people now a days.This is practice only which will make the person learn the things self and use them as and when required. Take the example of someone who has been sitting in the side seat of the person who was driving the car and he/she always felt that it was very easy to drive the car but one day when the same person tried his/her hand on driving, to do so was found very difficult. But after some practice the same person becomes as good as the other person was and in many cases, better than him/her.Another example of the mother cooking chapati for all and everybody feels as if it can be done easily but when one tries it for the first time, the results are known to all  very well.One student shared his experience of college, that in his graduation, he was taught two different papers by two teachers of the mathematics.Both the teachers were considered to be very good and their students respected them the most. One teacher would come to the class and tried to solve as many problems as possible when asked by the children.As always happens when somebody gets an easy solution of the problem then one does not try a difficult one and the same happened here also. The students used to get almost all their problems  solved by the teacher.In the other case, things were absolutely opposite and the teacher would solve only limited problems and rest of them were left to be solved by the students. The teacher would come in picture only when there was an actual need.The students had no choice but try themselves and at times used to feel disgusted and considered the other topic to be easy than this one which was taught by the second teacher. When they were about to appear in the examination they were more concerned about the topic which they had to practice themselves but when they appeared in the examination they performed much better in the topic they had done themselves(than the other one) with only appropriate support of the teacher.So here also own efforts played a big role.There is another story about a scientist who had tried to create something new and had worked very hard for many years without any success. One day he was asked a question by one reporter that, did he not feel ashamed of the fact the he had failed so many times(around one hundred times) and still considered self to be a great scientist? He smiled and  answered that he had not failed rather he was better than anybody else because he knew one hundred ways by which that problem could not be solved and now what ever he would try it would be different than these one hundred ways.He further said that nobody else knew these many ways by which this problem can not be solved.
So, everyone should understand the importance of practice and ensure that they have the patience and the perseverance to assert this very important way of doing better than before.At the same time another important thing which should be remembered is that practice is not the thing you should do when you are good. It is the thing you should do that makes you good.And also this is equally important to become better than what you are as on today. This makes you confident and you also learn to be self reliant.Thus, the old saying,"Practice makes a man perfect",is still significant if one is determined to achieve success and perfection in the area one chooses for oneself.

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