Perseverance shall pay off

I have a passion about human nature, both in a social context and as an individual. Most of my attention span is almost always a bit split between what I am doing and observing others. It’s a passion. I love to see how different people react and how that fuels the building of social texture that we all share.

While going through some older posts of some tango blogs in my news reader, I ran across this post in Mark’s blog. It bridges current scientific knowledge about performance at high levels and how it can be applied to the tango world. Broadly speaking, it applies to every activity really. The bottom line is that perseverance in pursuing your defined goals will pay off. It is interesting to stress the – now famous – expression called deliberate practice. Here’s a rough explanation from here:

The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice.” It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.

Mark did a great job of summarizing a lot of Anders Ericsson’s work and translating it Tango (for fun, also read this articles by Steven and Stephen). After reading Mark’s post and some original research papers (I am geek, I’m sorry) I immediately looked into what has been my experience as a tango dancer. First and foremost, I have not deliberately practiced as often as I should have. In class or practicas, it’s easy to default to things you already know and just enjoy it along with the music. This is easier said than done because sometimes absolutely beginners make puppy eyes and you can’t escape dancing with them. Also, getting a serious dance partner would probably help a lot at this stage.

On the other hand, it got me thinking as to why some people don’t have a serious drive to improve. Roughly half of the persons in my community aren’t seriously into technique. When talking about professors, most of them say that my teacher moves too slowly for them. I agree. Too slowly in giving you moves. But the professor makes you realize how you can’t even properly do simple things with absolute control. It requires a lot of technique and not guesswork. It requires countless times of trying it out and thinking hard about what makes what you’re trying to do work.

I have come to realize over many years of different physical activities that technique is important from a physical point of view but also from a mental one. Normally, people think of technique as a mere physical outcome. The more technically talented persons I know, the more I have found that they have deeply pondered about ideas, concepts and surrounding affairs concerning what they excel at. Concerning tango, they’re not amazing dancing robots. They have developed their own ideas through countless hours of practice and discussions with others. They’ve tried different approaches and conceptualized ideas that they are willing to share with others. That is, in essence, one of the reasons that keep persons motivated and actually deliberately practicing. By constantly assessing where you are, where you want to go and how to reach it – by thinking hard about it – you are always creating new goals to achieve. Newer pieces of the puzzle that make perfect sense.

My naive observation at this time is that communities tend to create subgroups of persons depending on how they see and live Tango. It is my wish that the technique focused ones will grow at a faster rate than the others.