The first is that, in my experience, most ambitious beginners feel like putting in a certain number of hours on something will necessarily lead to them getting better at it. But putting in the hours is only half the battle. Most people, when left to their own devices, tend to repeat the things that feel comfortable rather than what is correct. But when you are learning without a plan, some things come very easily while others take a long time. Eventually, this slows you down. You feel like you’re not making progress even though you’re putting in the time.
With structured learning, you learn the fundamentals first before the advanced material. When you organize the material into a progression, you won’t leave out anything that’ll hurt you when you need to do something harder. Each skill builds off of the last. This means that you won’t be trying to learn ten different things at once. Focus is easier because you don’t feel like you’re trying to tackle everything at once.
One benefit of structure is that progress is very easy to measure. It’s very hard to look back on your learning without structure and know what you can do now that you couldn’t do last week. That means that it’s hard to stay motivated. If you know exactly what you learned, though, that’s not a problem. If you’re not organized, then it’s much harder to figure out what’s going wrong if you hit a wall. If you’re learning something with a structured plan, then it’s easy to find exactly where you’re struggling. If you’re not, then you’re more likely to just assume that you’re simply bad at the thing that you’re learning.
Another benefit of structure is that it helps you to repeat the things you learned earlier. When you practice something without a plan, you’re not going to do that nearly as much. If you want to be able to do something advanced, then you’ll need to master the fundamentals first. You need to be able to do the simple things without having to think about it. If you can’t do that, then you won’t be able to focus on the harder things that make up the advanced material. You can always go back to fundamentals when you’re practicing without a plan, but you’re less likely to. With a structured plan, you’ll keep returning to those fundamentals until you master them.
Lastly, structure does not kill creativity. Once you have the fundamentals down, you can be as creative as you want. In fact, when you have the fundamentals down, your creativity is actually useful. Without a plan, you’re much more likely to be “creative” with things you don’t understand very well yet. This tends to lead to bad habits that you’ll need to unlearn. With a structured plan, you can create and play around once you have the fundamentals. That’s when you actually have the freedom to be creative. That’s when you can make up your own style. That’s when you can improvise and experiment. Without structure, practice time is just a bunch of practice time. With structure, practice time is a series of steps on the way to mastery.
