Learn your lines
“Repetition is the mother of learning” is supposedly a Russian proverb. What do we get out of repeating things? Are we wearing a path into our neural networks? Does doing something over and over make it easier because we’re remembering how to do it, or is it just that we grow more comfortable with the process?
How do actors learn their lines? How do figure skaters learn their routines? How do painters build technique? How do surgeons manage to stay within the usually invisible lines? Do we ever really do something the same way twice? Does anything ever go according to plan? Are we actually practicing so that when it comes to do things “for real”, we’re comfortable enough with the way things are supposed to work, we’re free to improvise?
I’d never really thought of something in these terms until I tried learning some lines for an acting class. By the time I actually gave them, the specific words themselves were no longer important. I knw them, but when I performed them verbatim, it fell flat. It wasn’t until I started tweaking things that I could really “own” the words. It helps that I wasn’t reciting Shakespeare.
The same is true in so many other pursuits. I think practice is what allows someone to know a scenario so well, she can enter it at any point, leave somewhere different, and come back to it in a third place without losing the beat. Practice produces confidence, and so does power. Being able to change the rules also inspires confidence — inspiration is often blocked by working within constraints.
But once that feeling of confidence becomes practiced, just like the original scenario, the constraints do become energizing rather than limiting — anyone can personalize something by coloring outside the lines; the next level of mastery involves making a statement by playing by the rules. Moving beyond changing things just because you can is the next step. Improvization allows for spontaneous greatness, but there’s something to be said for the well-rehearsed Shakespearian kind, too.