Knowledge, Practice, Trial and Performance

Competency is the ability to achieve real-world results in an area.

There are 4 complementary building methods to improve a competency:

• Knowledge: Reading, listening, and other ways of getting information about a skill.
• Practice: Trying specific parts of the skill with feedback loops to create focused improvements.
• Trial: Trying the whole skill in a simulated environment to see how we're doing.
• Performance: Putting all the skills and competencies to use for real-world results.

Different competencies will grow more efficiently with different methods or combinations, so be aware of which ones you use.

Guitar, brazillian jiu-jitsu, and writing competency building

My guitar, BJJ, and writing competency-building methods are quite different.

The Guitar: 90% practice, 10% trial

80% or 90% of my time on the guitar is practice time.

I'm running through scales, playing arpeggios, and developing technique. I'm memorizing a particular lick by repeating it until it's muscle memory, or as my teacher says, "in your fingers."

The other 10% is trial: I'm not a real performer, so I mostly play the guitar for myself or my guitar teacher.

These are the times when I address nuances in my technique and playing: the dynamics of picking softly or hard, the clarity of sound while playing fast, playing behind the beat, and so on.

Knowledge is important in guitar playing, but I receive it piecemeal in my guitar classes, and I don't find it distinguishable from practice.

This year, I aim to record an improvisation, and perhaps I'll also record one of my compositions. That will be my first performance in nearly 20 years, when I last played a concert!

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: 40% knowledge, 40% trial, 20% practice

My skill-building breakdown for BJJ has varied a lot through time.

I watch a lot of instructionals, which account for a good 40% of my time focused on BJJ. They are videos of world-class competitors explaining how to fight in specific positions and situations.

BJJ can be simple, but it can be very complex – and I like the complex kind. I have ~200 hours of instructionals, and they've helped me learn the theory for BJJ.

Then there's 40% of trial time, the sparring – or, as we say in BJJ: rolling. Right now, I'm taking private classes, and they mostly consist of me sparring with my 4-degree black-belt teacher.

These are great opportunities to put the theory into practice. Spoiler: it never works on the first try. I find out there's an escape to my technique, that I need to push with more force, or that there's a variation I missed. I then go back to write in my journal, watch more instructionals, and prepare for my next sparring session.

Finally there's some 20% of practice, or drills. Drills are essential in BJJ because you must perfect your technique, and as a martial art, it's hard to do it just in your head or only while sparring – you need the repetition to make it muscle memory.

I do some drills with my private instructor, but my drill time mostly happens when I go to general classes, where there's always a drill session before sparring.

Writing: 100% performance

Most of my writing is done with a purpose: clarifying and sharing my thoughts.

I've read books on writing, which qualifies as knowledge acquisition. From Strunk and White's The Elements of Style to Ann Handley's Everybody Writes to Murakami's Writer as a Vocation, I've had a share of reading about writing.

One could argue that all my book reading is a knowledge activity for writing, but I don't really believe it.

Benjamin Franklin has an interesting story in his autobiography where he describes practicing his writing by reading articles from "The Spectator" and then re-writing them from memory to compare them, a practice activity.

Like many other types of performance, I do get feedback on my weekly writing: Grammarly corrections, ChatGPT suggestions, and comments from others. But like most performance feedback, they're pretty superficial and don't significantly foster my growth as a writer.

While I believe writing weekly helps me improve my writing, I suspect it does so only marginally when compared to a proper regimen composed of more knowledge, practice, and trials.

By the way, one day I did something interesting: I prompted ChatGPT with the following: "hey, can you give me a random prompt for writing, and i'll write 500 words to get a feel of how quickly i write in english?"

I ended up writing a short fiction story for Midnight Café's Secrets; that was the only fiction writing I've done since school!

A rare practice activity for writing, in my case.

Applications to work and life

Our competencies are most important in two areas: work and personal life.

At work, many competencies are specific to our profession, such as programming and management, but sometimes they're associated with other skills like public speaking, persuasion, or business writing.

In our personal lives, there are some high-stakes competencies we must develop, such as parenting and personal finances, and there are hobbies and other activities we pursue, like playing a musical instrument, painting, or martial arts.

Applications vary because you will tend to take opposite approaches at work and in life. You often focus too much on performance at work and in life tasks and not enough on performance in your hobbies.

Work and life: building skills beyond performance

Doing work over and over is not an efficient way of building competencies.

When at work, though, we are often paid for the direct value we're adding, so there's little time to allocate to knowledge, practice, or trials.

It is particularly challenging when we're in stretch roles for which we're not qualified. Trying to learn "on the job" will only work if your work is easy to learn or your actions are inconsequential – neither of which is likely to be true.

Instead, you must focus on the other competency-building methods: knowledge, practice, and trials.

For example, if you're planning to do a 30-minute presentation, you would:

1) Knowledge: Read a few books on how to deliver effective presentations.

2) Practice: Find areas to improve and create drills for them, such as saying phrases without fillers: uh, you know, like, ..

3) Trial: Do a dry run of the presentation you plan to give, watch it for feedback, and then try again.

All of the above are examples of activities that are more likely to efficiently improve your public speaking competency than just delivering presentations as opportunities come.

The same principles apply to life tasks, such as personal finances.

One way to improve your financial discipline is to track your monthly spending and manage your budget.

But for example, if you want to improve your personal finance discipline, you would:

1) Knowledge: Read several personal finance books, including books on paying off debt and becoming financially independent.

2) Practice: Do the exercises on the personal finance books you bought.

3) Trial: Create a new financial planning spreadsheet with your new knowledge and techniques as a throw-away – just to learn.

Knowing how to break down competency building allows you to determine the most efficient ways to enhance your skills.

One thing is certain: performing 100% of the time and not employing knowledge, practice, or trials is not an efficient way to improve your competencies.

Hobbies: Doing hobbies for real with performance

Writing is a hobby I do "for real" – I write weekly for my readers.

Mentorship, too, is a hobby I do for real. Every couple of weeks, I mentor my mentees and help them grow and become better professionals and people.

Both these hobbies have an important performance component.

I have some hobbies for which I don't currently have performance components, though:

• Guitar: I don't do performances on the guitar, such as sharing my recordings or playing concerts.
• BJJ: I don't compete outside of my gym, to see how my performance stacks up in local competitions.
• AI: I don't apply my AI knowledge to real-life use cases.

Ideally, I would add more performance components to my hobbies —it's what they're for! Performance is the hobby's painting, the marathon run, the bike trail, the published book.

So here's the advice for both you and me: add performance components to your hobbies. Once you get good enough, put it out there.

Do it for real.

Analyze your 4 competency building blocks

Knowledge, Practice, Trial, and Performance are all components of building competencies.

How much we should invest in each depends on our activity and current expertise.

Usually, for work and life tasks, we spend too much time on performance, hindering our competency growth by not focusing enough on knowledge, practice, and trials.

In a reversal of that, we do our hobbies without performance components, giving up the value we could add to others through our passions.

So here's what I suggest:

1) Choose a competency at work or life: Find an activity you'd like to evaluate, such as writing, programming, interviewing, playing the trumpet, or riding your bike.

2) Break your effort into the 4 components: How much is spent on knowledge, practice, trial, and performance?

3) Define your ideal breakdown for that activity and your expertise: Given the type of task and your current level in it, what would the ideal breakdown be?

Some tasks require more knowledge, others more practice. An expert can usually focus more on trials than a beginner.

4) Evaluate the gaps to fill: You may need to read more about creating beautiful slides, practice writing asynchronous IO code in a web server, or record yourself singing a song from start to finish.

Using the 4 building blocks of competency as a framework, you can reflect on how you spend your time and find ways to change your activities to maximize your growth.