Practice Makes Perfect

The performance mindset begins, rather prosaically, with practice.

Practice is where creativity begins. Musicians play scales and exercises for hours at a time. Dancers build stamina and core strength in the gym, and then they and their dance partner work on small aspects of their routine – for hours every day, day after day. Actors spend weeks studying scripts and talking to themselves, looking for a way to inhabit their role.

All great performing artists practise very hard.

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the notion that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in any field. It’s not as simple as that, of course.

Gladwell didn’t mean that 10,000 hours of practice are guaranteed to make you a star. You need talent, and you need to practise in a purposeful, systematic way. And maybe you can become a brilliant performer with less than 10,000 hours of practice.

But take the virtuoso Chinese concert pianist Lang Lang as an example.

Lang was born in Shenyang in 1982. He started studying piano with a professional tutor at the age of three. When he was five, he won the Shenyang Piano Competition and performed his first public recital.

The schedule of practice drawn up for Lang when he was five by his father is shown opposite. It amounts to about six hours of practice a day.

Let’s say Lang was given weekends off from practice (even though he wasn’t). That would be 30 hours of practice per five-day week – about 1,500 hours a year if we allow the lad a couple of weeks’ holiday.

At that rate, by the age of ten (and ignoring the practice Lang must have put in between the age of three and five) he would have put in 7,500 hours of practice; well on the way to Gladwell’s notional 10,000.

Lang was a great believer in starting young. “Practising hard from the age of five is better than practising really hard from ten … I enjoy practising. If you don’t practise, you don’t make music,” he told Classic FM magazine.¹¹