On the value of practice

        I'd like to say that my recent life has seen massive paradigm shifts in how I view the idea of practice, due to the fact that I occasionally like to be overly dramatic in my writing. However, to stay as true to reality as possible, I will attempt to refrain from assigning undeserved importance to small events. Oh dear, I seem to have left you with the all-important question: "What's your point?" I would like to talk about practice and how recent developments have altered my view of it, dear reader. I'm not referring to the arcane definition involving lawyers and a mountain of legal terms, but the process of becoming better at any given activity.
        To begin with, I feel the need to distinguish something between the popular definition and my own. Practice is often called so because the activity is being done for the sole purpose of improving the participant's skills. Most people, for example, wouldn't consider a soccer championship match "practice" explicitly, though the weekly meetings to complete drills and related activities would be thought of that way. I would like to think that the term "practice" encompasses so much more than its popular meaning does.
        No matter the circumstances, when you are doing something, you are getting better at it. How much fun you are having and the enjoyment you reap from doing something matter not, and paradoxically the importance of the activity is irrelevant. Every moment of the championship game is preparing you for the next one, albeit silently. While playing any video game, you come to discover that you do better on subsequent playthroughs (I'm somewhat of an expert on that subject, being a video-game fiend of at least 11 years). After doing anything you come to realize that you could do it better next time. Hindsight is 20/20, as the saying goes. Anything and everything you do may be considered practice from this viewpoint, and thus we come to see that the popular definition is rather narrow.
        Taking this into account, we may find an important fact: everything that you do can be thought of as practice and thus may be considered inherently worthwhile. Working through a terribly hard mathematical problem will give you insight into the next one, like lazily sorting papers or working on a hard program all day will eventually make you the resident office wizard. Because the importance of the activity and the satisfaction you draw from doing it are irrelevant, they do not determine (or even affect) the inherent value of practice. In simpler terms, just doing something is at least a little worthwhile whether you hate to do it or not.
        At this point you may be wondering what the "recent developments" I mentioned earlier were. Well, recently, I was tasked with reading a book titled Outliers that talked heavily about the subject. A magical rule called "The 10,000 hour rule" came to my attention, and it went something like this: in order to become the very best at a given activity, of world-class quality, you must spend at least 10,000 hours doing it. At first I thought that notion was silly, but then the author brought up a valuable point: none of the exceptional people mentioned in the book were exceptions to this rule. With such a powerful body of evidence, I could hardly disagree. This rule had an unusual corollary when coupled with the fact I mentioned earlier: if you could possibly value becoming a world-class participant in any given event, every drop of effort you pour into doing anything is worth it to some degree.
        Perhaps more important than the random bits of information presented in my dissertation is this idea. Interestingly enough, this notion has another corollary: If everything you do is worthwhile, there is no need to feel sad for being lazy, because you are in fact working towards something by playing badminton with friends, or in my case playing League of Legends. Perhaps the limits of my style or writing skills will prevent me from conveying just how impactful this new-found philosophy is, but I will leave you, my reader, with the information presented here in the hopes that it will be as beneficial for you as it was for me.