“You all know the saying, ‘Practice makes perfect,’” my high-school teacher said. “Well, that’s not true,” he continued. “Only perfect practice makes perfect.”
His point was that doing something incorrectly, over and over again, simply reinforces bad habits. For practice to truly develop skills, the proper technique must be practiced and practiced until it becomes second nature.
His words came to mind as I tried, over and over again, to put the same piece into the same place in the jigsaw puzzle, a place where it almost fit, but not quite. So I would put that piece aside, work on other spots, and after 20 or 30 minutes, pick up the very same piece I started with and attempt to put it into the very same place where it did not fit half an hour earlier! Working on a 1000-piece puzzle, I’d guess there must have been several dozen pieces where I had this happen.
My experience with one piece stands out. There, among the cobblestones of Van Gogh’s painting, I must have tried at least ten times to put this piece into same spot! It fit perfectly to the left, and seemed to match the brush strokes on the right, but was just slightly off at the bottom. Eventually, after I had filled in the spaces above, I tried the same piece again. It matched up perfectly – both sides and now the top, but was still off at the bottom. Finally, it dawned on me: I removed the piece below. The piece I had been trying so long to put into that spot did fit perfectly! It was the piece below that didn’t!
I took the piece that had been wrongly placed, and immediately fit it into its proper spot, some six or eight inches away, in a space I had been trying to fill for hours! It then took no more than 15 seconds to find the piece that fit where the wrongly-placed piece had caused so much confusion.
I had long seen the problem – that the piece I was trying to place didn’t quite match up to the one below. But it took me forever to realize that I was trying to build on a mistake.
Jesus said, “Whoever hears these words of mine and acts on them is like a man who had the sense to build his house on rock” (Matt. 7:24, REB). How many of us try to build our houses, our lives, on mistakes, trying to force things to fit where they don’t, without having the sense to go back and correct the mistakes before we build further?
-- Bill
