I have been doing brain training games on lumosity.com for a while now. Doing the daily training has been fun, and I feel that they do have a positive impact. Of all the things I have taken away from the games, the one lesson that has most been on my mind lately has been that “slower and more correct is better than fast and being wrong.”
In certain games, one gets a higher score by getting more correct in a row, rather than total correct. I have always had a tendency to do things quickly, at the expense of not necessarily doing this completely correctly. I can see this manifest in a number of areas in my life. The earliest was when I was in middle and high school, taking exams I would often finish early and turn things in, getting a few mistakes that would have been easy to correct if I had taken my time. In my writing, I often find awkward phrases while editing that I imagine could have been done better the first time around. (Though, with writing, sometimes it’s better to just get the thoughts out and revise later.)
I have been thinking about this idea a fair amount during my tai chi practices recently. I have been focusing on practicing with more awareness and more precision, trying to do things correctly. Consequently, my practices have been slower and longer, but I find the work has been very rewarding.
I think too with programming, there’s a lot of conversations about incurring technical debt due to introducing quick fixes/hacks that will later need to be redone more properly. This too can be a case where doing things more correctly can be better.
The flip-side of this is trying to do things absolutely perfectly. This can be paralyzing to work on a project. It is a spectrum of correctness and speed: perfection and slowness on one side, fast but incorrect on the other. I think I have tended to be on the faster side, but I am now working to bring myself more in balance. I hope that the patience I have been working on in Lumosity and in my tai chi practice will continue to manifest in my music and programming work.