Adam and I almost never practice at tennis. We warm up for 5 minutes, 10 if we have a lot to talk about, then we start keeping score. I find it difficult to make myself run hard for the ball if we're not keeping score.
More serious tennis players practice all the time. They work on specific strokes, hitting cross-court backhands to one another, then forehands, then they alternate working on volleys and so on and so on. Reams of research show that such "deliberate practice" is important to making a lot of progress in specific domains.
Mary's brother Rob, on the other hand, likes to just hit the ball and says that he is so "intrinsically motivated" that he doesn't need the scorekeeping mechanism to keep him focused. Rob and I often hit with one another for a while before starting to play. I think he's not wrong to call this out as an instance of internal vs. external drivers.
I wonder if I shortchange myself by allowing myself to focus on external motivators like the score in a meaningless tennis match too often. I have written before about feeling to some extent imprisoned by numbers and metrics, mpg in the car, number of posts in the blog, more recently things like number of DuoLingo points (holding steady at 500 a day for over a year) and pushups (started the 1776 challenge (1776 in July) on July 2, an old shoulder twinge has slowed me down but am at 930 and counting -- i.e. I'm not going to make it but feel I shouldn't quit). Then there's also the question of money.
I think by and large I harm no one but myself with my overreliance on metrics. But do I harm myself? Certainly -- and I think I've written about this before -- the fact that it's not easy to quantify progress in guitar-playing has held back my progress on the guitar. But I'm good enough that at least Mary and the cats don't suffer too much.
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