A top psychologist reveals why 'practice makes perfect' is terrible advice

"Practice makes perfect" is a soothing bromide, one that you say to yourself before toiling away at a song on guitar, code on a computer, or a new recipe in the kitchen. 

But in his book "Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World," University of Pennsylvania research psychologist Adam Grant argues that it's not the best way to do something original. 

"Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new," he writes.

In an interview with Tech Insider, he explains that underlying the idea of "practice" is the assumption that you're following a certain set of a rules to do something in a predetermined way. 

"Practice is about reducing variation," Grant says. 

"Novelty, originality, is all about increasing variation, and that means having to do something differently each time," he says. "That defies the very notion of practice."

That's why practicing yields perfection in activities that have rigid, unchanging sets of rules, like classical violin or chess. In those contexts, putting in tons of hours into an activity yields success: that's the logic underneath the much-argued-about 10,000 Hour Rule closely associated with Malcolm Gladwell (and, to a lesser extent, Macklemore). Interestingly, these are also the domains where computers are primed to beat humans. 

But in other domains — like, say, business — the rules change rapidly, so sinking 10,000 hours into a domain doesn't mean you'll be at the top of a profession. Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel is the world's youngest billionaire because he has a deep understanding of what teens want, not because he's done more mobile programming than everybody else. Snapchat maximized novelty, rather than perfectly replicating other platforms. And it became the hot new thing. 

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