The late, great basketball coach John Wooden maintained that, “When you improve a little bit each day, eventually big things occur. Don’t look for big, quick improvement. Instead, seek small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.”

Wooden was talking about constant improvement and was a master at the practice of practice as a means of always getting just a little bit better.

We’ve all heard the expression “practice makes perfect.” The trouble is, it doesn’t always work, for a variety of reasons. Often we limit practice to things like the piano or tennis instead of what we really want to get better at, like breaking bad habits, nailing a presentation, advancing our careers, or running a company. Often we simply don’t have the mindset and toolkit to practice in a way that leads to improved performance.

Enter Practice Perfect (Jossey-Bass, 2012), a terrific new book by teaching experts Doug Lemov, Katie Yezzi, and Erica Woolway, who team up to debunk the myths about practice and show us how we can get better at anything by engineering how we practice.

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