Practice In Public

even if you feel naked doing it

One of the more useful habits I’ve stumbled into is to “practice in public”. For many people this idea is heretical. Practice and performance are two separate things. You practice in private so you can perform in public, right?

WRONG!

You should practice in public. You should also practice in private. Well, what’s the difference?

Okay, so on some level reps are reps. The more you do something (in any context), the better you get. All reps are helpful.

But when you do something in public you get different feedback. For example, if I practice a worship song by myself or with the praise team before church, it’s different than when we play the song during service.

Yet, it’s the same people playing the same song. How is it different?

The context is different. The feedback is different. The pressure is different.

That makes most people feel different and play different.

This is one reason there are huge differences between a “bedroom guitarist” and someone like Slash. It’s not just the songs or techniques. Slash has played thousands of shows in front of crowds over decades. He’s had a lot of public AND private practice.

What I find is I am often surprised at the reactions people have to my songs when I play them live or post them to the internet. I am a reasonable judge of my own work, but sometimes a song hits someone different than I expect. If I never played in public, I’d never know.

A good feedback loop is a key driver to learning. Practicing your craft in front of other people in a public setting gets you more feedback quicker than anything else. Thus, you learn faster.

For example, if you write code by yourself at home, there is no feedback loop outside of yourself. Once you have to start putting out pull requests for other programmers to approve, the feedback increases right away. And that becomes a huge opportunity to improve your programming skills.

Even something as simple as getting some form of live audience reaction is the key to figuring out what works and what doesn’t. It doesn’t even take a big audience either. It could be as small as 1-5 people and that’s enough to notice if people react or not to your work.

This is one of the benefits to the way my creative work has shifted. By writing this newsletter every day, I get to practice my writing in public. I get replies, comments, likes, subscribes, and unsubscribes. Sometimes I even get angry emails. All of that is useful feedback (even if I don’t think so at the time).

I get the benefits of just the practice itself, but then I get all the ancillary benefits of the feedback loop that working in public provides. Like, if I make a tiepo or has bad grammer, someone is going to call me out on that. And then the next time around I’ll be a little better for it.

And that doesn’t even get into the benefits of gaining fans or appreciation by sharing the work. That’s an entirely different topic.

So, if you have a way to practice your work in a more public way, I suggest you take it. It will level you up in a multitude of ways and you’ll be better off for it.

-Brian