October 12, 2007

Progression

The rule in my family has never been "Practice makes perfect" because if you expect perfection you'll be miserable and dissatisfied when you never achieve it. Our rule has always been "The more you practice, the better you get," which is absolutely true. The more you practice, the more comfortable you get with whatever it is that you're doing, and your ability to finess the fine details grows. This year, so far, has been a year of progression, meaning I'm practicing a lot and getting better. Evidence?



Or, take for instance, pistol yesterday. It started with a target like this:



Not that great, some very lovely 4s and a lot of inconsistancy. I kept shooting though, and my next target looked like this:



Getting better! Less variation in the shots and more in the black. No 10s, meaning I am still a bit inconsistant. I kept shooting though, and here's my next target:



10 shots, 5 of which are tens. Apart from the 6, the precision is almost dead on. This is the best I've ever shot, until my next target:



One shot one kill.

It's about practice, persistance, and wanting to get better. If you put in the effort, you will get better. The hardest part is just motivating yourself to put in the work. I have a pistol competition tomorrow, we'll see if the practice has paid off.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can I be you?

FreeLance said...

if only what you said was really true...
i can tell you it doesn't work with me in math, god knows how much i work and i can't seem to get any better. on the other hand, it's true for every other subject.