Pro Am Tip #34 - Practice - Part Two
If you’re a golfomizer, or a footballman, or a boxerist (Not a sports guy. At all.) then you practice your moves. You learn the proper technique (see the previous blog… and now I come full circle) and then you practice it over and over. You learn how to use the golf stick to slay the nineteenth hole gorpomizer guardian so you can sink your putt and thereby impregnate the putting green, ensuring future generations will have golf courses to play on……wait.
Got away from me there. I’ll try again.
You learn the proper technique and you practice it, so you do it the same way every time.
This is important to remember.
Elsewhere, I gave the most important advice I ever received, which is, to wit: finish everything.
This is good advice for a number of reasons. The fact of most writers is that they start tons of things, poems, stories, novels, songs, whatever, and they never finish them. Every writer has a pile of things that they didn’t finish. This is the biggest mistake you can make. Well, that and not impregnating the putting green. Last thing we need is golf courses dying out because we didn’t… never mind.
Not finishing something is the worst. Finishing something is the best. And here’s why:
When you practice a throw, you get better at throwing. When you practice a putt, you get better at putting. If you start a lot of things but never finish them, what are you practicing?
If you get good at quitting just because a piece is getting too hard, or you’re not sure where it’s going, or the characters suck, all you’re really doing is practicing quitting.
And what happens when we practice something? We get good at it, naturally.
If you finish everything, you practice finishing it. It almost doesn’t matter if it’s good or not, because ‘The End’ are the really important parts anyhow. When you finish something, you already know that you CAN. You’ve learned that it’s not impossible. And if you did it once, you can do it again. So go. Practice winning.