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Success vs Improvement

When first doing something well, we may believe ourselves to be good at that thing. However, this is often untrue.

As an example, when I am able to play a new piano piece well for the first time, I'm excited. I believe I have it down. However, I try again and the very next time, things go poorly. Sometimes even worse than it had been several weeks earlier.

But that only means a new phase of the journey has begun. Getting something right once is not enough. Doing something correctly regularly is a much better goal. My piano teacher would encourage getting a piece right three times in a row, three days in a row, before saying it was ready for performance.

The distance between getting something right once and getting it right several times in a row may be considerable, but still doable. I find a daily, gentle course to get there quite useful.

Setting up a task to repeat daily with a link to any relevant files often does the trick.

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