Practice Doesn't Make Perfect

How are you? Come on in here. Good to have you. It is a beautiful day here in the Daytona Beach area. It's sunny, about 75 degrees, and you know what's in the air?

I can smell it. No, it's not pumpkin spice. No, no, no, it's not that at all. I smell motorcycles and NASCAR. That's what I smell. Our time of the year is coming.

Today, I want to talk about practicing. We actually hear the NASCAR guys practice all the time. They're about six miles away, but we can hear them sometimes, depending on how the wind blows. Do you practice a lot?

You practice for perfection. What do you do? We'll talk about that today. Some of y'all got a problem with it. I'm going to give you a different way of thinking about it today, okay?

It is the Daily Boost from MotivationToMove.com, the positive boost you need every single day. It's me, Scott Smith. Good to have you here today. Thank you for stopping by.

Doing this thing a long time. I remember my grandmother in Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, right on the banks of the Susquehanna River where I spent so many summers as a child. And she's been gone since 1983, but I can still remember her saying, it's pretty near 95 degrees.

She said pretty near for everything. She'd say, you've been doing this podcast pretty near 20 years. It took me 40 years to figure out that pretty near was pretty near.

I thought it was just kind of strange Southern word that was done in the Northeast pretty near anyway. Yeah. December 20 years of doing this show and the lesson of practicing and perfection comes into play today as well. We'll get to that here in a second.

A lot of conversations, but I have a question for you. Would you like to reinvent yourself inside of 30 days? Yeah. I believe something. I believe that you can totally reinvent your entire life just like that instantly.

It happens all the time. When there's a big event that happens, things change. Think about the times you've run through things like that, where it could be tragic, could be fun, could be anything. There are times when everything's done.

That's it. Everything's changed. Also, there are times when it takes a longer time to do it, where you can just barely get started, which is usually we focus on. So the daily boost is a great way to start.

But if you want real progress and real transformation and real change, you have to dig deeper. What I teach on this show is such, it's on the surface level. I just can't get to the other stuff. I can't work 15 hours a week doing a podcast, okay?

But I do that in my Face Your Passion group. So if you're looking to reinvent, looking for like-minded people, you want to mastermind with them, you want to hang with me a little bit, get some great coaching calls on a Thursday, go to faceyourpassion.com and join us. The founder rate is half off.

until we get to 100 people and we're getting there pretty fast. FaceYourPassion.com. Let's talk about this practice thing, okay? Because we hear a lot of, I mean, over the years, I've had a lot of teachers, my guess is you have too as well, that have said, you need to practice more.

First time I ever heard that, I think it was in middle school. They handed me a tenor saxophone in sixth grade. My granddaughter, Vivian, out in Portland, they just handed her an alto. I will never like her again.

I'm sorry. I'm just a tenor snob. That's it. They gave me a tenor and I said, okay, well, great. What do I do now? They said, well, now go home and practice.

I said, really? I started practicing. I went to state band, did the jazz band, did the whole thing. Because I was told practice makes perfect. You practice that tenor saxophone, you'll be perfect.

And yet the more I practiced, the more I realized that something else was happening instead. See, there's a problem with this thing about practicing. See, when they handed me the tenor saxophone and they gave me like, you know, 15 minute lesson, it turns out it only produces perfection. You know, practice makes perfect.

when you practice perfectly. Hmm. When everything is correct, when you know what you're doing and you can catch your mistakes. But if ever the case, why would we need to practice, right?

So at this day and age with TikToks and YouTubes and then chat and all that kind of stuff, people seem to think, I don't need to practice. I'll just read the stuff. I have the information. Boom, let's go do it.

That's all I need. And yet they still hire me as a coach because they've tried everything. See, they don't have 45 years freaking experience doing this stuff. They don't know the core.

I don't care how much you read. I don't care how much you research. You're not going to know because you've never done it before. You can't practice perfectly because you don't know the core basics.

My client, Dave, he came to me wanting to start a podcast and he wanted to be so good at it. And he really, really put the work in the outside the walls podcast. If you'd heard the first couple, you would have laughed. I did.

And he did too. But you know what? When I transferred, you know, 40 plus years of experience doing this to him, And he suddenly knew what to practice.

That podcast got good. He's still doing it. It's great. Outside the walls on YouTube and Apple and every place else. This podcast is far from perfect.

A lot of people tell me that. Scott, you could do better. Maybe. Probably not. I figure after 5,000 podcasts, it's probably the best I can do. Right? I tried.

I've tried to make it better. It doesn't get any better. I've tried to make it worse. It gets better. I have no idea what's going on. One thing it is is this.

It's permanent. See, a lot of podcasts start out, and they do five or ten, and they're gone. They fade. They can't get it perfect, so they don't do it anymore.

I'm at 5,500-plus podcast episodes. It's kind of permanent in the lives of a lot of people. It's kind of permanent in my life right now. See, if you practice anything, it becomes permanent.

Hang on. Here comes the alert. Am I talking like Ted Lasso? I think I'm starting to – I think I'm watching Lasso. Believe. If you haven't seen Ted Lasso, you've got to watch that.

How about bad thinking? Stinking thinking, right? If you practice stinking thinking, it's just a matter of time before you get all the bad thoughts you ever want.

Do that long enough, your life becomes full of bad thoughts and lots of repercussions. Practice makes permanent. And a lot of you have been practicing some bad thoughts out there.

How about bad manners? We live in a time now when we have a lot of bad manners out there. I don't know that it's intentional bad manners, although we're seeing some of that behavior. I think it's just like people are just stuck in their own little world these days.

So they're practicing bad manners and they wonder, why aren't they being nice to me? Well, if you're rude to other people, even if you don't know you're rude, well, guess what? You're practicing every single day and you're going to get the same treatment in return. Practice makes permanent and you doing bad manner stuff is good at it, aren't you?

How about relationships? If you have bad relationship skills, meaning the stuff you do is not really conducive to a good relationship, you're kind of guaranteed to miss out on the best of life, what it has to offer.

And the worst part is the more you practice those skills of being a sucky partner, the better you get at it. It never goes away. Practice makes permanent. However, you know, if you practice being positive, forward thinking, and you believe that life is good, that's what you get, right?

Practice makes permanent. People say to me, hey, Scott, I love your positive vibe. Listen, I'm like anybody else. I don't always have a positive vibe.

I have a positive vibe on a podcast. That's easy, right? I can show up and be positive. But generally speaking, most of the day, I'm a pretty positive guy.

I do see the world that way. Why? I practice it. I don't see any need to do anything other than that because that's going to happen anyway. Practice being a good person.

That is always thinking of others. If you do that, you're going to find yourself surrounded by people who think of you. Practice makes permanent. You do the good stuff, you get the good stuff, and it becomes permanent in your life.

Practice being present, respectful, loving in your relationships, and you'll never be alone, will you? Once again, practice makes permanent. How about the gym?

Go to the gym all the time? You've got a nice body. You maintain your weight. My wife exercises four or five days a week ever since I met her. And everybody I run into is a joy.

She just works out all the time. Look at her. She's in great shape, and she is. She's done it her whole entire life. Now, I'm not in bad shape. I'm not four or five days a week in shape because I don't work three hours on my butt every day.

I'm sorry. I've got other stuff I need to be doing other than working on my butt every single day. However, I got pretty good biceps, got pretty good chest, got pretty good shoulders. You look at me from my age, you're like, what?

How old are you? I look 10, 12 years younger than I am, and I act that way as well. My wife said I act younger than that. The point is, whatever you're focusing on, whatever you're practicing, remember, you have to have an underlying foundation even to get perfect if you want it to be perfect.

But for the most part, whatever you're practicing is what you're going to get because practice makes permanent. Pay attention to what you're doing today. It is how things are going to be.

here in the future join us at faceyourpassion.com right now come on inside let me say hi and get to know you see if I can help you reinvent yourself see you tomorrow