I’ve been reading some kinesiology texts of late (yes, really), and stumbled across an interesting paper by Dr. Richard Schmidt [Motor Learning, 1988] about acquiring motor patterns through repetition.

Schmidt’s extensive research focused on the amount of practice necessary to learn a movement, to make it habit. A new pattern learned from scratch, he discovered, seemed to reliably take between 300 and 500 repetitions to become permanent. But new patterns learned to correct and replace an old, less efficient pattern instead consistently took between 3000 and 5000 repetitions – a literal order of magnitude difference.

I’ve thought about that recently as I’ve worked out, looking at the ways I move in basic exercises. But I’ve thought about it even more, looking at how I ‘move’ through the rest of my life.

Over the years of running companies, I’ve developed work habits, communications styles, and basic approaches to business. Most of those, on inspection, have served me very well. But a handful have not. And, indeed, I’ve increasingly noticed that I spend disproportionate amounts of time and energy undoing the problems cause by those handful of inefficient, bad patterns.

I’ve been focusing on correcting those patterns, replacing them with new, better, more efficient approaches. And, for the most part, I’ve been moving forward. But, of course, like with anything new, from time to time I misstep.

Before, I’d always believed the business self-help book saw that it takes 30 days to make a new behavior a habit. And, perhaps, in some cases, it does. But Schmidt’s research makes me think that time has nothing to do with it. Instead, it’s about volume of practice. And, in the case of re-learning something, it’s about a very, very large volume of practice.

Five thousand is an inordinate number of times to face a decision, and to make the right choice. In that context, those missteps seem inevitable. How can you do something new correctly five thousand times in a row?

And, just as important, in that context, it’s clearly only worth setting out for change when you’re ready to buckle down for a long-haul commitment, when you’re ready to start even knowing that you aren’t aren’t ‘done’, you aren’t finished thinking about your actions, until you’ve got things right again and again and again, three thousand to five thousand times.