What?
I am not sure what I am going to write today. I was talking to my friend Ankit about how practice is an important factor in life. Everything that you are willing to learn, or you need to learn comes with practice. Personally, I was thinking of improving my patience. So we will have the same structure, the what, the why and the how. So what is practice? "to do an activity or train regularly so that you become very good at something". Notice the words todo an activity or to train regularly so that you become very good at something. By doing it means that you actually do the activity, for example, when you play cricket, you practice batting, when you want to improve your guitar skills you practice guitar. This needs to be done for long intervals of time. For an example, if you want to practice dance, you need to dance for long intervals of time and really practice learning dance. If you want to learn coding, you practice coding. If you want to learn anything, you practice that. So that's the what. The activity of doing.
Why?
Why is practice important. Think about a simple form of practice: One form of practice is that you want to practice a new language. That's a skill. And skill eventually gives you money as well. When you have money, you get self confidence as well. You need to understand that self confidence will give you more self confidence and help you develop more skill. But the root is practice. You will keep improving your skill when you keep practicing, and if you stop loving the subject, you will start to love the subject as well.
Let's say you are learning Spanish.
Example:
1. Develops skill: When you learn and practice Spanish, you are developing a skill. This skill can be used eventually in the world as a translator or can be productive to someone.
2. Earns money: Once you have the skill, you become the translator. A translator of a language from one to the other is a job and that can earn you some money.
3. Gives self confidence: Once you earn money, you get the self confidence. And this self confidence adds to your future successes.
4. Develops Patience: When you practice something, you practice with the intention of developing more patience in life. Patience is developed in practicing patience. Rome was not built in a day. It takes time to build Rome, so wait and wait and be patient.
5. Continuous Improvement: Whenever you practice anything in life, you are going to improve that skill. For example, when you practice spanish, you improve your Spanish skill all the time.
6. Love for the subject: You might hate the subject of Spanish initially, but with time as you get better you would love the subject as well.
How:
The natural question now is how do we practice. I am telling how I practiced leetcode myself.
First of all everyday, I would practice 1 hour each day to understand the concepts.
1. Understand the concepts: Let's say I start with a topic called Breadth First Search. My first thing was to understand the concept of BFS.
2. Example problems: Now, I would take a look at some example problems and write it with pen and paper and then practice the same problem without seeing.
3. Test my skill: Once I have understood some example problems I will try to solve a few problems on my own. I will give myself at least 30-40 minutes in order to solve the problem. Once that is done, if I don't get the problem still, I will then look at the solution.
4. Challenging: Now, that I have practiced a few problems, I need to practice more such problems. But this time instead of just a problem solving thing, I will participate in a contest or a competition so that I know where I stand and from there I really get much better.
Action Steps:
Take a skill, and then keep practicing that skill with patience. It might take one year or more to master but keep doing that daily.
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