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Just saw this article on varying practice for progressing in music mastery. The article is by Noa Kageyama who’s blog, Bulletproof Musician, focuses on research-based tips to tackling everything related to music, from stage fright to efficient practice.

The article lists three tips:

1) Distributing practice - taking small chunks and practicing throughout the day
2) Variable practice - practicing a passage in different ways
3) Interleaved practice - take a few bits that need practice, and cycle them

This is all really interesting in the context of this project. A long long time ago, I discussed Distributing Practice under the guise of Pavel’s “greasing the groove.” I also touched on Interleaved Practice, but I called it “Microcycles” (here, here, and here).

Back then I was trying to attribute Distributive Practice to habit formation, and Interleaved Practice to regimentation. What’s interesting is that it really didn’t work for me. But I never thought to instead apply these to Mastery like Kageyama does.

The article recommends two books - The Talent Book, by Daniel Coyle, and Making it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel, two books I’ve already had on my to-read list.

Day 542 & How Mastery Can Adversely Affect Habit

Day 542 Record Keeping (52)
Day 511 Fixed Meditation (80)
Day 457 Bodyweight Exercise (6 typewriter pushups - 65)
Day 384 Writing (53)
Day 557 Eating (65)
Good sleep, ok wakeup. Depressed.

How Mastery Can Adversely Affect Habit
I’ve lately been noticing how my once absolutely rock solid superhabits have become torn lose by pushing for mastery. But what’s even more interesting on closer inspection is how day-to-day the techniques I use to push mastery interfere with the solidity of habits.

Take for example my recent run. I’ve been meditating every morning after getting up from bed, and after my recent hiatus from recording, I’ve got this as my daily SRHI for fixed meditation:

Looks awesome at first. I continue with my normal course of meditating right after waking up. So I’m scoring perfectly. Mid-way through the week I decide to switch up my schedule. Why? Because I’m pushing writing, and after I do my meditation, I feel drained to really do my writing habit.

It makes sense, from a mastery perspective, to switch up my schedule to do writing first. But as you can plainly see, this has caused turbulence in my SRHI scores for meditation later on in the week. 

If I look into the actual SRHI test, I notice that it’s the automaticity questions that are really getting me. I can’t honestly say it’s automatic, because the habit has been pegged to the mornings. When I do my writing, THEN meditate, there’s something off. It’s not automatic, I have to think about it.

This is all ok at this level - my meditation has only gone down a few points, and I”m sure it’ll level out. But for other less solid habits this can cause serious problems down the road. 

My writing habit, which was incredibly strong, has fallen a part specifically because of hard knocks from another vector - just pushing the habit. Eating has always been unstable because it’s not pegged to anything, it’s a floating habit. 

I have a feeling that skillfully dealing with these protuberances are at the heart of success in this entire project.

Day 538 & Current Status (I’m Back!)

Day 538 Record Keeping (55) 
Day 507 Fixed Meditation (84)
Day 453 Bodyweight Exercise (3 typewriter pushups - 74)
Day 380 Writing (59)
Day 553 Eating (66)
Bad sleep, bad wakeup.

Current Status (I’m Back!)
In the last several weeks I moved to Spain. Dealt with finding an apartment. A week later, just when I was acclimatizing to the time difference, I left for India. Adjusted to the time zone there and after 10 days returned to Spain. Dealt with paperwork for residency. It’s been a week and I’m finally back!

Needless to say, this has recked havoc on my habits. I had very spotty internet in India, and somehow regularly got into a quadphasic sleep pattern, sleeping for four hours twice a day, which was incredibly discombobulating.

My record keeping is shot. Bodyweight writing, shot (the next article on my list was one I needed to do some heavy internet research for). Eating, shot - there really wasn’t much choice as to what to eat there. But surprisingly my basic bodyweight exercises have been pretty stable, AND my fixed meditation has been incredible. Made some real progress there, and got a perfect score on the SRHI today.

Not too shabby despite extreme circumstances.

I took stock today, and decided that what is best for me is to just nail my habits this week. I’m back to my basic minimums:

-2 typewriter pushups for bodyweight training
-basic meditation. I can regularly get to 3rd jhana, but I’ll settle for quality timed durations (starting with 20 minutes) of first.
-basic writing - that is 50 words on an article for work or any amount of editing

I’ll start pushing next week. On that note, today a few points came up:

-I can feel vortex forces ripping at me - I want to do everything NOW. One possible solution would be to push one habit and change what I push the next day on an alternating schedule. Lydia has done something like this and it seems to work by preventing those psychological forces from ripping apart her habits.

So, instead of selecting on thing, say writing, to push for a few weeks, I would push write on day 1, bodyweight exercises day 2, and repeat.

-Writing is a real problem right now - it’s always been tenuous - I think I went too far too fast. The step up from writing x amount of words to writing x amount of a work-related paper was too much. I didn’t sufficiently form a “ledge” like I did transitioning from pushups to typewriter pushups.

One way around this would be to treat doing x amount of work-related words as “pushing mastery”.

Also I can switch up my habit order, doing writing as soon as I get out of bed.

I’ve recently been doing meditation, which is great, but today I pushed it hard and was utterly exhausted. Depressing and frustrating in the moment, utterly forseeable in hindsight.

I think it’s really really important to make sure I know where I’m at, and what the next ledge is at all times (and I feel this should be emphasized when improving upon Timothy Ferriss’ DiSSS protocol). Having adequate metrics and a pathway to the next ledge prevents stagnation, and I feel that I’m having severe problems with that nowadays, even despite the chaotic moving/travel situations.

There’s a lot of talk on Reddit, Quora, and random online articles about all this. But what I have to remember is though the advice being given is good, it’s all about one habit. I’m now entering that intermediate stage of this project of dealing with the dissonant harmonics of trying to level up multiple habits to mastery, and that’s no easy task.

Day 11 and Habituation is not Mastery

SRHI=46

Great sleep, woke up groggy and soar

Habituation is not Mastery
This is one point I’d like to underscore what with my obsession with habits. A habit does not mean you’ve mastered a skill. Some habits are a win in and of themselves - if you eat right, you are going to reap the rewards. The same goes for exercise in losing weight and things like flossing.

But the same does not go for many skills - i.e. learning a musical instrument, becoming functionally strong, learning an art, etc. At some point you’re going to get stuck in a plateau where you habitually practice a task but do not progress. It’s natural to practice parts of the skill you feel most comfortable with but not actual aspects that you have to work on to become better.

Busting through these phases involves mental anguish and may involve changing up your practices. But that’s all in the future and there is no doubt I’ll have to talk about methods to bust through plateaus. But for me, the first step in that long walk towards skill acquisition is forming the bracketed period of time in which you practice.