Practice

Practice means repeatedly doing something for the purpose of learning and improving, not merely doing it a lot. CF distinguishes effective practice from idle repetition: you only improve when you put thought into getting better, isolating errors, and raising your success rate on purpose.

CF organizes practice into three stages: first succeeding once, then raising your success rate through repetition, then doing it efficiently with little attention — which is mastery. The mechanism is automatization: you first work something out with full conscious effort, then drill it until your subconscious handles it, freeing scarce conscious attention for harder problems. CF treats conscious attention as a limited resource, so how much to practice depends on reuse and stakes.

Two CF rules stand out. Pursue correctness before speed or ease — practicing fast while erring just automatizes mistakes. And break things into parts you can perform and check independently, which sharpens error correction. A lingering error rate (say 1 in 20) signals an unsolved conceptual problem, not random noise.

CF applies practice to ideas, not just physical skills: mastering prerequisite ideas is what lets you build a knowledge skyscraper of higher layers. CF credits Objectivism’s account — all learning automatizes knowledge to free the mind — making this shared with Objectivism. Practice is not exploratory trial-and-error; it consolidates an already-chosen correct method rather than searching for one.