Put in the Reps

Put in the Reps

There’s knowing.

And then there’s knowing what to do.

Those are not the same thing.

You can know the theory.

Know the method.

Know the rules.

Know what the textbook says.

And then reality hands you something that doesn’t look anything like the textbook.

Now what?

That’s where experience starts to matter.

Plans are useful. Reality is better.

Dwight Eisenhower once said:

“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”

I’ve always liked that idea.

Not because plans don’t matter.

Because the real value of planning is often what happens while you’re doing it.

You think through possibilities.

You ask what could go wrong.

You consider alternatives.

You make assumptions explicit.

You identify what you don’t know.

You prepare.

Then reality shows up and does something you didn’t anticipate.

Of course it does.

That doesn’t mean the planning was wasted.

The planning prepared you to respond when the plan stopped being useful.

If something happens here...

A cousin of mine recently retired as a Delta captain after years of flying international routes.

He once told me something about crossing the Atlantic that has stuck with me.

I’m paraphrasing, but essentially, part of his job throughout the flight was to continually know his options if something went wrong.

If something happens here, where can I go?

A few hundred miles later, the answer might be different.

The flight had a plan.

But part of being prepared was continually thinking about what to do if the plan stopped being the plan.

He wasn’t waiting for something to go wrong before considering his options.

Thinking through the options was part of the job.

Every flight.

Mile after mile.

Rep after rep.

Put in the reps

Athletes understand this too.

Patrick Mahomes doesn’t take thousands of practice snaps because he expects Sunday’s defense to behave exactly like the scout team did Wednesday.

He takes the reps so he’s better prepared when they don’t.

Same with musicians.

Surgeons.

Carpenters.

Analysts.

You practice.

You encounter patterns.

You make mistakes.

You correct them.

You try again.

And after enough repetitions, something begins to happen.

You stop consciously working through every decision from first principles.

You begin to recognize things.

That looks familiar.

Something doesn’t look right.

I’ve seen this before.

We usually call that intuition.

Sometimes we call it judgment.

I often call it the Force.

But it isn’t magic.

It has a history.

Intuition has a history

Experienced people sometimes seem to know what to do before everyone else has even figured out what the problem is.

That can look mysterious.

Usually it isn’t.

They’ve seen more.

They’ve tried more.

They’ve failed more.

They’ve been surprised more.

And they’ve had more opportunities to connect what happened with what happened next.

Eventually, some of that accumulated learning gets compressed into something that feels like intuition.

A strong analyst can sometimes look at a result and immediately think:

That doesn’t make sense.

They may not know why yet.

But something in the pattern is inconsistent with what prior experience has taught them to expect.

That feeling doesn’t provide the answer.

It tells them where to start looking.

Repetition isn’t enough

There’s a catch.

Doing something repeatedly doesn’t automatically make you better at it.

Bad habits get repetitions too.

Bias can get reinforced.

The reps matter. But feedback is what turns them into learning.

Did it work?

Why?

What didn’t work?

What did we miss?

What would we do differently next time?

You try.

You observe.

You adjust.

You try again.

That’s how experience becomes judgment rather than merely history.

Practice develops capability when the reps produce learning.

Knowing what to do

This is where expertise becomes different from knowledge.

Knowing how to run a regression is useful.

Knowing what type of regression is appropriate is more useful.

Knowing how to calculate statistical power matters.

Knowing when the test you’ve been asked to run doesn’t have enough power to answer the question matters more.

Knowing the steps in an experimental design is important.

Recognizing that something happening in the stores has compromised that design?

That takes something else.

It takes knowledge.

Experience.

Context.

Pattern recognition.

And judgment.

It takes reps.

The value of practice

We sometimes approach professional development as though capability can be transferred through information.

Read this.

Watch that.

Attend the training.

Learn the framework.

Take the course.

All useful.

But none of them eliminates the need to actually do the work.

Work the problem.

Make the decision.

See what happens.

Get feedback.

Try again.

And there's another kind of rep.

What would I do if...?

You don't have to personally experience every possible problem to learn from one.

Think it through.

Consider the alternatives.

Ask what could happen next.

Decide what you would do.

Planning can be a rep too.

That’s how the abstract becomes practical.

That’s how knowledge becomes capability.

And eventually, that’s how you develop the judgment to respond when the problem in front of you doesn’t look anything like the one in the training material.

For lack of a conclusion…

There’s knowing.

And then there’s knowing what to do.

The distance between the two is usually filled with practice.

Not mindless repetition.

Repetition with feedback.

Try something.

See what happens.

Understand why.

Adjust.

Try again.

Think through what might happen before it does.

Do that enough times and something starts to change.

You recognize patterns sooner.

You notice when something feels off.

You know which questions to ask.

You know when the standard approach applies.

And you know when it doesn’t.

Eventually, what once required deliberate thought begins to look a little like instinct.

But it isn’t instinct.

You put in the reps.