Practice: An Art for Getting Better
“Everything that we do is practice for something greater than where we currently are. Practice only make improvement”, Les Brown said.
Someone ever said, “Practice makes perfect”. Doesn’t it sound weird? How could we set ‘perfect’ as our goal? If you ever ‘believed’ in that, we are the same. The first time I think that it was kinda weird is in my fourth workshop at XL Axiata Future Leaders. As human beings, we simply can never be perfect. Let me give examples. On July 1687, Isaac Newton found Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation and formulated it into a famous equation in his book, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The civilization believed that it was a perfect equation of gravity for years until Albert Einstein found the anomaly of Newton’s equation and revise it with his gravity theory.
No, we are not gonna talk more about numbers, equations, or whatever that can make you feel dizzy. I promise. What I am trying to say is we — as humans — can never be perfect. Even Isaac Newton, the second most influential person in history — according to Michael Hart — is not perfect. Albert Einstein knew this and did experiments and practice a lot between 1905–1915 until he announced his theory of gravity. Now, we believe in Einstein’s theory just like how people believed in Newton’s Law of Gravity back then. It is not impossible that there will be someone in the future that can revise Einstein’s. Once again, the conclusion is that it can never be perfect, but it can be better and better.
If practice can not make us perfect, then what? Yup, it surely can make us better. I personally have a love-hate relationship with programming. It was in 2020 when I was falling in love with programming for the first time. I have never been so scared and so excited at the same time. I have never been so curious. It is like finally, I found a beautiful garden, full of flowers, but there are so many thorns in that garden, but still, it is the kind of thorns that I would like to dance barefooted on it. Long story short, I started learning and struggling. After so many times, I didn’t find myself perfect at it. I always wonder if I can solve programming problems just like solving the ‘1 + 1’ kind of problems. I watched programming tutorial videos, but still can not understand them deeply. I even could not make something with it. Until I maneuver from just watching tutorials to do that on my own hands. I keep practicing and gaining hands-on experience, even now, and find myself better time by time. Am I perfect? absolutely not. I still find so many errors in my code. But now, I am getting better. From could not make anything with programming to make my own portfolio on my GitHub.
To sum up, having ‘perfection’ as a goal is actually impossible. Even if possible, it is actually a quite dangerous goal to have because if someday you consider yourself perfect, then on that day you will stop growing and being better.
