In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

— Yogi Berra

I spent last week in beautiful Salt Lake City.  In addition to being awed by the beauty around me, I was there for an investing class.  As much as I love learning about investing, I’ve found that I get embarrassed because I’m such a slow learner.

I don’t mean that I sit there and hold everyone back because I don’t understand, I mean that although there may have been a few techniques that I hadn’t heard before, most of what I learned in this class, I relearned.  In other words, I’d heard it before and either forgotten it or rejected it.  I really, truly, honestly don’t know which it was.

In my older age, I am learning that I can be terribly stubborn.  Despite having written a post about needing to remember that sometimes I’m the student and I need to accept what the teacher says, I still can do remarkably “dumb stuff.”

So I’ve been kept back, not by the teacher, but by myself.  I have too much experience and not enough wisdom.  The good news, I suppose, is that I wasn’t alone.  I don’t think that there was a single person in this class who hadn’t heard most of this before.  Yet, we all felt that we were hearing it for the first time.  It seems that sometimes, we just think that we’re smarter than we really are.

You may have heard that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.  In this class, what we were being taught was to do the same thing over and over in order to get the same results.  In other words, if you can define the list of tasks that reliably produces the results you want, do them over and over until you want different results.  It’s only boring if you really don’t want to get predictable good results.

Practice, Practice and Even More Practice

It’s not just investing that works this way.  Any discipline that requires that we repeat a process to get results works best when we can reliably execute the steps over and over.  Often, we don’t like doing repetitive tasks because we believe that we bring something unique and wonderful to the task.  And we do.  But it turns out that when we bring that unique and wonderful contribution is after we have learned how to reliably complete the task and achieve the expected results.

We can apply this analogy to any sport.  I have a neighbor who loves to play tennis.  He has played tennis for over 50 years.  During that time, he has repeated his backhand and forehand volleys probably hundreds of thousands of times.  The paths that he has created in his brain mean that he can reliably respond to the ball coming at him.  The creative genius comes in that he doesn’t have to think about how to hit the ball, he has time to strategize about where to hit the ball, and what kind of spin to put on it.  These are things that come only with lots and lots of repetition.  The repetition gives his brain time to evaluate and choose between strategies.  It makes him a much better player.

Research shows that when we deliberately repeat a process, we become more and more adept at it.  The benefit we didn’t understand until recently is that when we know something so well we can do it “without thinking,” our brain actually has more time to think.  We have more time to create and consider options.  This is where we gain the wisdom to perform extraordinarily.

So, I guess I need to practice the skills I’d learned before I went to class.  The more I practice, the better I’ll get.  The better I get, the more freedom I’ll have to act within the constraints that I’ve been taught.  Then, it will be time for me to make the decisions I thought I was qualified to make before.  But, it’s going to take a lot more time than I ever thought.  I guess I better get started.