THE ROAD TO PERFECTION

What do swimming, golf, tennis, running, dancing or playing a musical instrument have in common? Give up? All these activities are taught through a series of drills! Back on the subject of drills, we'd like to re-emphasize their significance.

Many naively think that drills are not important or that they are not for them. So when experiencing set-backs or no progress at all, they don't make the connection between improving technique and perception through drills, choosing instead to alternate routines or try something new, doing "whatever" hoping to get "somewhere."

Technique is the cornerstone of an outstanding performance. And drills are the cornerstone of perfect technique. It's pretty simple. It is the ability to repeat the movement with perfect precision every time that separates the few from the many.

Playing the piano is as technical as running, playing tennis or swimming. Each activity has fundamental components that must be learned in order to play the game, dance the dance or perform the composition. And for every component, there is a drill attached. Our technique can be developed and then lost, or it can be consistently maintained. Drills are your tools for maintenance as well as facilitators of your progress.

Drills simplify and dissect the learning process into smaller parts that we can see, feel, perceive and perform. The goal is to develop our perception of fundamental movements, so we could repeat them automatically and as close to perfect as possible every time.

The road to perfection starts with small technical steps repeated over and over again. And as a genius painter Salvador Dali once replied to his student who asked what is he supposed to do if he got everything perfect, "Do not be afraid to be perfect, you'll never reach it!" Human learning is an endless developmental progress from one plateau to the next, where each new achievement is not an end, but the beginning of a new cycle of discovery.

Article by Dr. Nicholas Romanov
Composed by L. Romanov