Although repetition is necessary, practice isn’t just repetition. When we practice, we do two things: we isolate a technique for study, and we engage with difficulty.
On the train ride I repeated this line to myself, your allocation of effort determines your reality . Mastery requires effort sustained over time. The ability to make practice sacred through repetition. It’s the gardener, philosopher, writer, financier, artist, entrepreneur. Our roads, architecture, movies, books, music, everything beautiful in thi... See more
Mastery, Robert said, requires boredom and tedium. It requires doing the same mundane things over and over and over. It requires sitting with the frustration of putting in work that doesn’t immediately pay off.
There is no finish line. There is no winning, no losing.
Everything is a Practice.
A practice is the disciplined repetition of what you know with enough experimentation in that repetition to unlock those things you don’t yet know. It is ever-accumulating, and never-ending. It is sometimes painful, but that is the way.
My entire philosophy of how I organize myself as a working painter can be summed up by something George Carlin said: “Just keep movin’ straight ahead. Every now and then you find yourself in a different place.”
You hear a lot in art school about how painters must continue to “grow” and “evolve”—but I think those are such bullshit words. There is gre... See more