The virtue of drilling
ID: 20fbc933-391f-41d6-93cb-991c56c1330e REVIEW_SCORE: 4.0 MTIME: [2025-05-03 Sat 12:45],[2021-07-10 Sat 11:25]
Places I have found that drills work great at increasing skill:
- Singing
- Drawing and painting
- Writing
Places where I'm told that drilling works great, but I find it aversive to actually do it:
- Language learning
- Coding
Why and how does this work? Learning How To Learn has good explanations, and so does How to get Better at Painting above. In a lot of skills and practices, it's way easier to shallowly model what you need to do than it is to actually do it. When you execute from the model it quickly surfaces the real edges of what you don't know. Great! You now have known unknowns. How do you learn them?
- By doing narrow well-defined practice at those edges
- minimizing the confounders
- running a lot of trials with small variations
- replicating your findings to reduce noise
Congrats, you've invented drilling!
There's an art to a good drill, it's a design problem. Often the best drills for something are ones you invent yourself, because you have the best information on what you're blocked on. CFAR Turbocharging training gets at this.
Equally, sometimes you're learning something where a lot of prior art exists around the pedagogy of it, and there are really good drills that someone has designed for you. Carnatic music is like this. The drills are a thing of joy - they feel like really well-designed levels of a rhythm game. (Which they literally are!) You can do speedruns, slow runs, go back and make things harder by improvising in between your marks, key them up or down, etc. They progress by introducing more variables in a series of challenging runs designed to get you to explore their use and interactions and constraints, so as you progress there is more and more room for elective difficulties and creative choices, that generally keep pace with the skill level that each drill is building. Each series of drills works out to be something like a vitamin - a module targeted to a skill factor, that you can go back to when you find yourself flagging.
Years ago, I came across a website called WriterKata (since defunct) that had a gorgeuous, simple drill practice for writing. It functioned, as a good kata ought, as a warm up, as priming, as a way to reflect on where you were that day - and also as a way to microdose tht really really unpleasant feeling you get when you sit down to write. It helped me equalize to the demanding headspace of writing well. I fucking loved that practice, and sporadically pick it up to do in my daily notes. (Writing this has reminded me that it exists! Add a point to the scoreboard for Toricelli.)