Repetition is the mother of skill.

I heard Tony Robbins state this in one of his audio programs, and it stuck: "Repetition is the mother of skill." No skill is born without repetition, without trying again and again until it is mastered.

James Clear takes it a step further with his recommendations for small habits that ultimately change our lives. Habits are repetitions of an act or behavior over and over and over again.

We live our life in cycles, day after day, month after month, year after year. The space in between these cycles is inevitable -- there is no way to brute force one into mastery by spending a single day on a task, even with one's whole effort and concentration, to master something. Though there may be some short-term acceleration in intensive focus, the scale of skill acquisition is not on a day basis. It is on the scale of weeks, months, years, decades.

We have finite focus and energy during the day, so we can only focus so much on a given skill each day. The key is consistency to keep repetition alive. We perform our practice each day, and our brains do the work to integrate what we've learned during rest and sleep.

Skill acquisition and knowledge remind me so much of exercise. I believe there is an unspoken narrative, a misconceived understanding, that the brain can go on with a task all day -- that it does not need rest like the body does. But it absolutely does. Taking breaks between bouts of work is like taking breaks during weight training -- we MUST give the body time to rest, or the muscles will get damaged. So too can our brain be exhausted and perform worse at the task at hand without intermittent rest.

Repetition: repeat, rest, repeat.