5 Muscle Memory
Skills are not the same thing as knowledge. Skills run deeper than knowledge. To prove skills, you can’t just say the right thing, you have to do the right thing! The key to skills development is practice, practice, practice. Then more practice! A highly skilled person (think of a concert pianist, a sports all-star, or a master chef) performs tasks quickly and fluidly without really thinking about it. What does it take to develop that kind of skill in IT?
First of all, skills don’t really live in your brain – they live in your body. Skills are not just what you know, they become who you are. Think of your human nervous system as a “stack”. In IT, we talk about software “stacks” all the time. A software stack is multiple layers of programming that work together to support complex operations. Humans have layers too. There are systems to keep your blood pumping. There are other systems to move your limbs. There are still other systems to control your moods, process what you see and hear, form words, remember things, or to make up your mind about what to do to next. The key to skills development is, you have to use all that!
The kind of skills development that works well for IT is called “muscle memory”. Like the keystrokes that are forming this sentence right now. The fingers don’t have to ask the brain where the letter “a” is. The fingers just know. How? In my case, about 50 years of practice, starting with a high school class on old-timey manual typewriters. The whole class was about how to type by touch. That involved endless repetitions of sentences like “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” It was the most boring class ever – but also the most valuable. Of all the skills I learned in high school. typing by touch is the one that I still use every day. Typing by touch is muscle memory.
The key to developing muscle memory for IT is hands-on practice time. If you are taking a coding class, you need to write code. Lots of code. If you in a class on servers or networks, you need to put your hands on servers and networks. Even in the cloud, where you cannot see any of the physical equipment that makes the cloud work, you can still set up console sessions to the cloud and put your hands on command line utilities that control everything in the cloud. Do that. A lot. Keep practicing the same things over and over and over again until they just become part of your life. You are not just working to learn new things. You are also working to learn the same old things over again, but this time you want to learn them quicker, more accurately, and more automatically.
In an ideal skills practice session, your success rate should be very high. Don’t practice things you do not understand! If you do that, you are just reinforcing failure and frustration! Drop back a level or two or three until your success rate with whatever you are doing is more like 80-90%. You want to practice doing things the right way and getting the right results. That will build your confidence and your speed. Once you are confident you can complete a task quickly, easily, and successfully, start working on the next skills. At first, with a new skill, your success rate will not be as high. Drop back and practice the easier skills some more to get warmed up. Compare the new skill to the old one. What exactly is different this time? Can you find something in the new skill that compares to an older skill you already have? Your skills should grow out of you like branches on a tree – each new skill should just extend a little bit from the skills that are already part of you.