What A Turkish Student Taught Me About Practising

Early this week, I was in Istanbul, Turkey for a holiday trip with my house mates. While I was visiting the Blue Mosque (Sultan Ahmed Mosque), I was approached by a local. "Are you from China?", he said. "No." "Can you speak Chinese? Fluently?", he asked. "Yeah." Then, he started to converse with me in Chinese and told me that he is learning Chinese in his university.

Although it was only a short exchange of a few sentences, I was really impressed by him. It was not because he could speak Chinese very fluent. He could not actually. That was what I was impressed by. Although he could not speak Chinese fluently, he approached a Chinese stranger to practise the language he was learning. If he keeps up with this practice, I am very certain that he will pick up the language much faster than his peers who do not practice outside the classroom.

3 Things I Have Learnt From Him

1) Being an amateur is the reason to practice, not an excuse to not practice

This is very clichéd but I always make the mistake of not practicing because I feel that I'm not good enough, people will not like what I produce and people will laugh at me. I realised that those are all my perception. That may all be true. Or not. If I want to improve, I have to overcome those fear and practice. The Turkish student spoke to me in Chinese even though his Chinese was not very fluent.

Thinking back, my event photography skill improved tremendously when I was forced to practice it in my job in the events team of Singapore Exchange (SGX). I only just bought a DSLR as I want to take nicer photographs. However, my superior assumed that because I have a DSLR, I was good with photography. (I was not.) So I was in charge of taking photographs during events almost every week. I am not of professional photographer standard yet, but I am very certain that I am way better than I was when I just bought the camera. Now, I am taking photographs for my triathlon team during races.

However, is simply practicing sufficient? Something else may help to speed up the learning process.

2) Practice outside the "classroom"

By saying "classroom", I meant our comfort zone. It can be an actual classroom or, for those learning a new skill online, the environment you are learning in. The key here is practising outside our comfort zone; and not just simply practicing.

The Turkish student practiced Chinese, not just with his classmates, but with a Chinese stranger tourist he met on the street. I believe practising this way will speed up our learning process. As with my photography experience in SGX, I was not taking photographs and hiding them in my laptop. I had to post them up onto the intranet of the company. It was definitely not comfortable to share them with the entire company at first, but I had to. That certainly helped (read: forced) me to improve fast.

It can be as simple as what the Turkish student did - exchanging a few lines with a Chinese. As I am learning to code in Ruby on Rails, it means that I should not just follow tutorials and practice to code, but also sharing my code with other coders and asking for feedback. For an amateur photographer, it means taking many photographs and sharing with people beyond your family and social circle. Perhaps on Flickr? For a designer who just started, it means not hiding your designs in your "Designs" folder but posting them onto Dribbble.

Usually, the hard part is not the action of practising outside the "classroom"; but the mental barrier of actually doing it. If we want to improve faster, we just have to get over it.

Ok, we are all ready to practice with others now. Who should we practice with?

3) Practice with someone better than me

Did you notice that the Turkish student asked if I could speak Chinese fluently? I believe he was intentionally looking for native Chinese speaker to practice with. There are many benefits for doing this. We can trust that he or she is less likely to teach us the wrong things. He or she may correct our mistakes, which will help us improve.

This can be applied to many aspects of life. For example, for swimming, I have been forcing myself to train with the faster swimmers in my team this year. I always finish each set behind everyone and have to do shorter sets due to the time constraint of each training session. However, I have improved much more than when I swam with the novice group last year. It is because the faster swimmers corrected my technique when they spotted mistakes in my swim stroke. It is also because I felt challenged and that made me work harder.

In summary, these are what the Turkish student taught me about practising a skill and becoming better:

1. Being an amateur is the reason to practice, not an excuse to not practice
2. Practice outside the "classroom"
3. Practice with someone better than me

What have you learnt about becoming better? I would love to hear about them (: