 I'm almost sure that many of you might be familiar with the 10,000 hours rule which was debunked. This outlines that there is a minimum number of hours required to become an expert in any field. But what if you don't want to become a grandmaster wizard in that particular scale or hobby you want to explore and develop? Someone who just started playing chess will only think in terms of individual moves. You start with the pawn, then you move the knight, maybe your castle? And probably you don't even know why. But for a professional player, these moves barely manifest in an individual manner. The grandmasters will project their plays into the future in their head, and sort of work out the plays by using an unperceivable instinct that will get them closer to the actual win. So instead of playing with individual moves, they play with high level patterns. They have the English opening, the Indian defense, the Queens gambit. The skill they practiced for so long allows them to see into the future. And they are always ready to improvise and switch the patterns when needed. But this comes through years and years of practice and there is also talent and context and luck to consider as well. And for an inexperienced layman such as myself, this sounds like improvisation. Writing and speaking feels a lot of time like improvisation as well. Each one of us probably had a moment when we heard a rather specific sentence and we suddenly realized that we had the same idea. But if we had to put it on paper, the way we would outline it would probably be different from the one we previously heard or read. But the one who can improvise will always have an edge. The ability to adapt to changing circumstances, either you talk about social integration on comfortable conditions, but also those actions of the non-physical variety is indeed a valuable skill one can have in the back pocket. And in many cultures, being predictable, especially as a man, was considered a flaw. Lack of imagination was not permitted. And if you go deeper into something like the music industry, you can look at something like the early jazz scene which was heavily dominated by the scent of blood pumping competition and improv. And there are of course many unusual levels of reasoning to any skill. And practicing the actual skill is the process of training your brain to think of these unusual levels of abstraction. Which will then allow you to add the art of improv into the mix. And you're actually improvising every single day. When you're writing something such as a casual text message to someone you are imagining the way the conversation will move forward. You hear and see the conversation in your head, you already know what you want to say before you decide to put it on paper. You then rapidly pick the best set of words and work combination that sounds the best and you hit send. You have your own library of words and subtle meanings you assign to these specific words and you swiftly pick them up and tie them together, creating your unique style. You are not patiently analyzing the true meaning of each word in each specific sentence because you already know what you want to say. But as a quick personal note I think that one should pay careful attention to how the terms are being used as I find that words have life and meaning. Practicing is another example of high-level individual actions one performs that are mixed together and end up creating a style. The dancer doesn't spend time actively thinking about how to move the hand or the head. Through practice they have eliminated the need to do it. Their step, their stride is longer and allows for information compression. And what practice will eventually do for you is allow you to think in terms of high-level strides so that you can have space to improvise when needed. And practice will also give you the confidence to improvise. Practicing being creative by playing around with day-to-day objects surrounding you will sharpen your creative engine so that when you really need to improvise you will have the ability to do so. One who doesn't want to use a lighter when lighting up a candle and having no matches around for setting purposes and uses a toothpick to film three seconds of b-roll carries a decent advantage. Having new ways to fix something, either by performing some physical trickery or choosing that particular word to say to someone in distress or even figure out a decent way to diffuse an emotional dispute between friends. By practicing stuff you learn to read the patterns surrounding you. Either we are talking about learning how to read social cues or when to talk and when to listen when to stay silent, it can really feel like playing with blocks of Legos. The blocks representing patterns and the patterns are being filled with tiny beats and pieces of moments of practice and actively paying attention to what you're doing creates a toolset and intensifies your ability to seize an unforeseen opportunity, allowing you to embrace risk, serendipity, become anti-fragile and ultimately create an adventure out of each life experience.