Any Skill You Don’t Practice Is Lost
Everyone has heard the old adage: “Practice leads to perfection.” However, practice is not only about developing skills. This is also to support the ones you have already built.
As the Art of Masculinity advice site explains, the skills you’ve already acquired can fade over time. Through disuse and neglect, your brain can start to forget even the best skills if you don’t use them for a long time. It doesn’t happen overnight, but practice a little from time to time to prevent the erosion of useful skills:
We often feel that we can leave parts of ourselves dormant, and they just remain as they are, waiting for us to start developing them again. But the truth is that every component of our physical and mental state operates on a use-or-lose basis. Life is all about swimming against the tide of deterioration – if you don’t make constant effort to move forward, you are thrown back.
Of course, we can only choose a certain number of skills to practice, so this might be the right choice to let a certain skill die. As much as I loved playing as a kid, my skills in playing the Jet Force Gemini are not very practical for my adult life. However, if you want to maintain the ability to play this instrument, do this workout, or speak the language, you should probably keep practicing even when you don’t need to.
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