This.

As a creative person (UX designer, cartoonist, painter), I have experienced this throughout my life, especially in drawing. As a kid I drew constantly, in school, at home, everywhere. All through my life I drew and drew. If quantity was all it took, I would be a master. But I am not. I still can't draw bodies and poses and Im not consistent at all.

Quantity gets you to learn quickly to a point where you platou. I've seen this in my painting, games, and even work.

You need to pause and start thinking about what you are doing, what each part means, how it works together, coming up with what you are doing wrong, what is right, and practice that. You still need to put in more work but its a dance of pause, think, do, repeat.

I would rephrase the last part of it as "Only mindful practice makes perfect." Sure, it makes the quote less catchy, but imo it makes it more accurate.

I observed it myself with a lot of things, esp. when it comes to learning an instrument over the course of almost 2 decades (piano specifically, in my scenario). Sure, you can pick a few notesheets and keep practicing the entirety of them from start to finish at full speed over and over. However, the process will be extremely non-efficient and will make you take much longer to learn the song, and it won't make you take away as many lessons from it that are unrelated to that song specifically (i.e., those "unrelated" things that make you a better piano player overall).

Instead, you need to be mindful of what specifically goes wrong, what goes right, and target practice those problem points specifically. Let's say you have a few bars with a syncopated rhythm in a song you are learning, and you are struggling with that section specifically, you nailed the entirety of the song otherwise. Instead of just keeping playing that entire song over and over, you should practice just those few syncopated bars by themselves at a very very slow pace with a metronome. It will feel very awkward at first and give you a feeling that you aren't progressing much. Then you start incorporating that small problematic section into the entirety of the song. Then you speed up the tempo on that specific section and practice it at that tempo over and over. If the problem is in your left hand, you practice the left hand by itself first, then graduate to both hands. Then you try to incorporate it at a higher tempo into the rest of the song.

The whole process of that sounds very tedious and painful, but mostly because it actually is. However, it will lead to much better results. Not only you will learn this specific piece much quicker using such a methodical approach, you will perform it much better and way more consistently at the end. You end up dissecting that problematic point so much, whenever you see syncopated bars in the future in completely different music pieces, you will have much less problem with them. Which will allow you to spend more time improving other aspects of your play or learn other techniques. All of that learned knowledge ends up snowballing and compounding so much, over the course of a few years you end up massively outperforming someone who just blindly kept practicing pieces over and over from start to finish until they got them right.

I think that’s a nice take and I think it applies very well with piano. I am not the GP but I think perfect practice is more of an umbrella term. I think sometimes the perfect practice session would be a mindful practice other times or in other situations (besides piano) it may not be. I think perfect practice is probably easily tied with perfectionism. Perfectionism does not have a good connotation, because it usually means one is either too self-inflated or too self-defeating. When I think of perfect though I think of the right thing in the right situation. It acts almost like a liquid it fills the very shape it needs to be in for it’s helpful use case. I may be arguing with loaded terms though that’s the problem with words they can be conflated and misinterpreted, and sometimes their connotations change from what some might say is a more pure/exact definition.

Thanks for your reply. I fully agree with you about non-existence of a "perfect" practice, but in general, not just in cases outside of piano.

I don't believe there is such a thing in real life as "perfect" piano practice either. Everyone has different needs in different areas of piano that they would need different approaches to overcome. That original post of mine just described a basic core idea that should be a solid guideline for getting more efficient at it, but without specific details and choices each one would make. If this was all there is to it, then piano instructors would be obsolete, and they are far from. Even top tier pianists occasionally take lessons from others.

Compared to other skill-learning experiences that require practice that I had, I don't think piano is in its own separate category, it is very similar to pretty much everything else. I simply picked it because piano makes it easier to illustrate that principle to the general audience. Same thing can be said about sports, visual arts, etc., anything that requires work through repetition, heavy knowledge/experience, and is heavily-reliable on manual execution with a very high (nearly infinite) skill-ceiling (i.e., not something like writing software where knowledge is about 95% of the work, execution is about 5%, since execution is literally just typing and knowing your IDE shortcuts, both of which have a fairly low skill ceiling).

I’ve heard a similar quote and I think I read it while I was playing Call Of Duty Modern Warfare about ten years ago, and for some reason it has stuck with me for all this time (probably because I see it as Truth.) I’m somewhat paraphrasing but it goes:

“A novice practices until he gets it right. A professional practices until he can’t get it wrong.”

It reminded me, at the time, of the great drummer Neil Peart who has since passed away. I saw a video of him practicing and possibly performing doing a solo and as he was doing a fill down the drums I barely noticed he had broken a stick in the middle of his drum fill and replaced the stick with a missing one. I was so in awe I had to rewatch that part. To him even something as rare as breaking a stick was prepared for and second nature for him to react to. It just amazed me the practice he had had to make that possible. They call this man the human metronome for a reason he would almost quite literally never miss a beat.