Practice--What Einstein Really Said

I'm sitting astride a  window sill at my grandmother's apartment, the bedroom window we all like to jump out of onto sandy grass below, despite the adults' interdictions. I'm eleven years old. Opposite me, legs dangling in time with mine, my eight-year-old cousin patiently and proudly blows bubble after bubble. Eyes riveted on her mouth, I work the tip of my tongue into my own pink wad of Bazooka, trying over and over to create that balloon.

A quick Google search will tell you Einstein didn't say it.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

This quotation, attributed to Einstein, is popular to the point of cliché, perhaps especially in personal development discourse.

Variations, like the pleasingly rhythmic "If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you always got," are similarly popular.

The problem is twofold. First off, Einstein almost certainly never said that. A quick Google search, even a search steered to the assumption he did say it, will pull up dozens of articles denying that attribution.

But, memory and record being what they are, nobody really knows who said what anyway. The second problem is far more important.

What about my bubblegum? I can't remember the last time I had a Bazooka, but I can now blow bubbles like a pro, even with skinny stringy chewing gum.  Had I not sat facing my cousin, legs dangling, teasing and tongue-tipping and penetrating and puffing, watching, watching, over and over, that would never have come to pass.

Had I said "doing the same thing and expecting a different result--i.e. expecting to be able to blow a bubble where before I could not--is insanity," I'd have jumped off the window ledge and run off to chase lizards long before any bubbles.

That's a trivial example. A more cogent example is from playing music, although alas, I'm not playing these days. For a good portion of my life, mid teens to mid twenties, I was an almost-professional-level oboe and english horn player.  But for the first couple years, I really sucked. I sucked so much, I almost wanted to give up many times.

I practiced blowing those bubbles, playing those scales, holding those long notes, single notes at different volumes, no wavering. I learned there were aspects of playing I was really good at, enough to encourage me to keep going, but there were other aspects that were much more difficult.

And here's where what Einstein really said comes into play. What he said, which I think is what was interpreted as the above quotation, was

A problem cannot be solved with the same level of thinking at which it was created.

At the junior music conservatory I attended as a teenager, I was self-conscious of being one of the least good sightreaders in the oboe class. Sightreading is extremely important for orchestral and small-group playing, where you need to learn several pieces of music in a short time and be able to play the right notes in the right place from the get-go.

On the other hand, I was by far the best memorizer in the class; I could memorize almost anything almost immediately. In the orchestra setting, this made up for my deficiencies in sightreading, after the first couple rehearsals, but there was an even chance I'd have embarrassed myself in those early readthroughs.

One term, our teacher did a class on sightreading and memorizing, putting it openly on the table that some people are naturally better at sightreading and some at memorizing. For this class, the focus was memorization, since for almost everyone else that was the weaker skill, but she offered tips for improving both abilities which qualified as solving the problem on a different level of thinking than that at which it was created (in our brains).

Instead of playing a piece over and over, people practiced memorizing by building muscle memory, fingering out the piece without actually blowing their instruments. They disrupted "flow" (which can be interrupted in a performance context and shouldn't be relied on) by playing the piece through in altered rhythms. People built the brain connection to the piece by studying the sheet music notation silently. (I performed a party trick, memorizing a piece this way without ever playing it, performing it for the first time at our next class meeting.)

My sightreading improved after this class too. Instead of trying to keep my spot and play the right notes at the right time, I practiced listening to the piece as a whole, reaching out to sense how my part fitted into that whole. More importantly, I learned to read a few measures ahead of where we were playing, so as to anticipate, have my fingers in place, be ready.

By the time I left for college, although I still felt insecure about my sightreading, one day I realized that I never got lost on a first readthrough anymore and seldom played any wrong notes. I had continued practicing my sightreading, both privately and--the real test--in orchestral and other group music settings. The better I got as a player, the more I got to play with higher-level groups, the more frequently I had to perform on very few rehearsals, occasionally even sightreading in performance.

Had I cried "insanity" and quit practicing, I'd never have gotten there.  Practice practice practice. But my junior conservatory teacher's guidance on shifting the practice paradigm showed me different ways to solve the issue, to practice better. 

And since everything is metaphorical, this helped with other "sightreading" situations too, reading unfamiliar environments and people, seeing how I fit into an overall picture, looking ahead.

Yes, there's a time to recognize something isn't working and try something else instead. But perhaps that "something else" should be a deepening or a heightening, not haring off on a different path entirely.