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Why practice makes perfect | linus.coffee

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There are higher levels of thinking to any skill. Practicing a skill is really the process of teaching your brain to think at higher levels of abstraction. A beginner chess player only thinks in terms of individual moves and positions. Move the king here, the rook there, the knight over there. But when you watch a grand master play the game, the individual moves barely register. Instead, the grand master thinks in terms of higher-level patterns – the English opening, the Sicilian, a castling. A chess players must project the game into the future in their mind, and intuit the moves and plays that will lead them closer to a win. In this task, being able to imagine the future of the game in terms of moves and patterns, rather than individual moves, is a powerful advantage. Veteran players can see patterns and project them out several plays into the future, and that practiced skill helps them see more from the game than what meets the eye. When I improvise on the piano, what happens in my

There are higher levels of thinking to any skill. Practicing a skill is really the process of teaching your brain to think at higher levels of abstraction. A beginner chess player only thinks in terms of individual moves and positions. Move the king here, the rook there, the knight over there. But when you watch a grand master play the game, the individual moves barely register. Instead, the grand master thinks in terms of higher-level patterns - the English opening, the Sicilian, a castling. A chess players must project the game into the future in their mind, and intuit the moves and plays th

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