Use It or Lose It

I thought about this recently when a friend invited me to go target shooting.   Several years ago,  I went to the range often and achieved (and least in my own mind) some level of competance in the shooting sports.   I was always at the top of the class in terms of shooting skills; the last class I took as part of a legal requirement saw my score recorded at twice that of the next student (250 points possible; he shot a 125).  

The hour on the range on Saturday reminded me that those days are long gone and won't be coming back without a bit of effort on my part.   The trip reminded me that skills can be fleeting; that an art not practiced is an art soon lost.   I shot no better, accuracy-wise, than the majority of folks there that day.   What happened?   Obviously, I hadn't used the skill and so lost it.

You have almost certainly experienced this phenomenon as well.   Quick, without looking it up, what it is the formula for finding the length of one side of a triangle if you know the opposite angle and lengths of the other two sides?    Almost everyone has had trigonometry at some point in their academic career but only a few of us remember it because most of us don't have the opportunity or need to use it on a day-to-day basis.   A skill not used is a skill soon lost.  This same pattern exists for many different kinds of skill sets and is a reason why those in roles that affect safety (pilots, police officers, paramedics, and more) are subject to rules regarding how often they must exercise their skills and training.   There are many other non-safety areas where such is important - guitar players practice riffs, for example, and military units do drills appropriate to their function.  

As a software developer, I constantly write software not only for my job, but also for the express purpose of staying current with the techniques and technologies associated with the task.     The exercise of refining a problem into its essential logical elements, translating those elements into a design to solve the problem, then translating that design into a specific technology (web page, mobile application, etc.) hones those skills far more than does reading or other study method (though those are important too).      Would you want to get on a plane whose pilot hasn't flown at all in the last year but has read lots of graphic novels about flying adventures?   I would not, so then why would I expect my employer, whose business may very well depend on the skill and accuracy of its software, ever considering doing something similar by hiring someone who has "read a lot about computers"?

Practicing your profession with dedication and intent sharpens your mind and trains your thoughts so that you can perform at your best when it counts.    Practice is also the mark of a professional - as the saying goes, "An amateur practices until he gets it right; a professional practices until he can't get it wrong.".     Too often, I see would-be professionals masquerading as amateurs simply because they haven't practiced their trade to the point of being able to fully exercise their potential.    Amateur, indeed.

As  Phillip Su put it,   "Athletes do drills.  Musicians hone difficult passages.  What do you do?"