Serguey Asael Shinder – IT Professional

There’s a piece I can still play slightly wrong, and it’s entirely my own fault. Years ago, learning it, I practiced a passage over and over at full speed, fumbling the same two notes every single time. I thought I was practicing the piece. I was actually practicing the mistake.

Nobody told me the thing I most needed to hear back then: practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Whatever you repeat, you carve in — and I had faithfully carved in the wrong fingering, rep after rep, until my hands knew the error better than the correction. To this day, under pressure, they still reach for it.

That lesson turned out to be about far more than music. Repetition is not neutral. It doesn’t just make you better or leave you unchanged. It makes whatever you’re doing automatic, for better or worse. Sloppy reps aren’t harmless filler; they’re actively teaching your hands, or your habits, the wrong thing, with total commitment.

So now, whether it’s an instrument or a skill or a way of working, I slow down until I can do it right, and only then do I let repetition take over. Because I’ve felt, in my own fingers, the cost of making a mistake permanent.

Choose what you carve in. You’re always teaching yourself something — the only question is whether it’s the thing you actually want to keep.

– Serguey Asael Shinder