by Serguey Shinder
There was a stretch of about a year where I played every day and never played for anybody. No sessions, no band, no recording. I told myself I was building something and would come back stronger, and in a narrow sense that was true. My hands got faster. My accuracy on the passages that had always defeated me improved in a way I could measure and feel.
Then someone asked me to sit in on a couple of songs, and about thirty seconds in I understood that I had spent a year training something that was not quite playing music.
I was fine as long as nothing surprised me. What I had lost, or perhaps never had and had simply stopped noticing the absence of, was the ability to keep going when something went slightly wrong. A drummer pushing a little ahead. A chord I did not expect. My own hand landing in the wrong place. Alone in a room, every mistake has a rewind attached to it. In front of people it does not, and that gap is the entire skill, and I had gone a year without practising it once.
I think about that year often, because the same structure turns up everywhere. Practice and performance feel like the same activity and they are not. Practice is where you are allowed to stop. Performance is where you are not, and what separates them has almost nothing to do with how well you know the material.
At work the equivalent is the difference between understanding a system and being the person on the call while it is down. I have known engineers who could describe an architecture flawlessly and who came apart under the specific pressure of having to decide something now, with people waiting, on information that was obviously incomplete. That is not a knowledge gap. It is a gap in a different skill entirely, one that only exists under conditions you cannot manufacture on your own.
So I stopped treating exposure as the reward for being ready and started treating it as part of getting ready. Play before you are good enough. Take the incident shift. Present the half-formed idea to people who will push back on it. Not because the outcome will be good, because often it is not, but because the recovery muscle is the one that cannot be built in private, no matter how many hours you put in.
My playing did not get worse during that year. It got narrower. And narrowness is very hard to detect from the inside, because everything within the narrowed range keeps improving, right up until the moment you step outside it and find out what is no longer there.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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