How do you get to Carnegie Hall? According to the old joke, “practice, practice, practice.” While it may sound like good advice, it’s not the best or fastest path because practice can only get you so far, says Scott Young, author of “Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery.”

In his book, Young uses the example of increasing proficiency at Tetris, the block puzzle invented by Russian computer scientist Alexey Pajitnov in the 1980s. “People were spending 80-hour-week sessions on the game and playing on level 29 (the highest) was thought impossible,” he says. “Now you have 12- and 13-year-old kids doing something that could not be done 20 to 30 years ago.”

What’s changed is communication and information-sharing among players, made effortless by the internet and livestream videos. “It says a lot about how learning works in general and learning in different contexts,” Young says. “You could do a lot of practice, but if you weren’t using the best techniques that were known at the time — like other people’s known techniques — you might not improve.”

The correct way

Practice is not a panacea, Young says, explaining, “It’s not something that monotonically makes you better at things. It tends to make you more automatic and more fluent at things, and that has its strengths and its weaknesses.”

For example, fluency is critical when it comes to reading. You will be a successful reader only if you can recognize the letters and their sounds effortlessly and put those sounds into combinations.

“We have to practice and train for many skills,” Young says. “But lots of practice doesn’t automatically mean that you’re learning the best method.”

A good example is typing on a keyboard. Many of us learn to type the “proper” way with our fingers on the keyboard’s home row. Others still type using a hunt-and-peck approach. You can spend a lot of time hunting and pecking, and you might get faster and more fluent typing this way. However, you will plateau at a lower level of speed than if you learn the home-row typing method.

“Practice makes permanent” is the rebuttal to “practice makes perfect,” Young says, noting, “You really want to at least do the correct technique from the beginning. That’s why piano teachers and tennis coaches prefer to train someone who’s had no experience rather than someone who’s had a lot of experience. Fluency can make us confident, but it doesn’t necessarily make us very skilled.”

Proficiency needs feedback

In his book “Outliers: The Story of Success,” Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000-hour rule. It states that to become really good at something, you need to spend 10,000 hours, or about 10 years, doing it. While Young doesn’t dispute the value of spending time on a skill, he adds that confidence can have blind spots. Practice will increase your fluency, but you must learn from your outcome by getting and calibrating decisive feedback.

“What’s interesting is Anders Ericsson, whose research was a big inspiration for this 10,000-hour rule, was pretty explicitly against the idea that just spending a lot of time doing something would make you particularly good,” Young says. “He argued for this idea of deliberate practice, which was not just practice but practice under the guidance of a coach with immediate feedback about your performance. He argued that you needed those ingredients, otherwise you can spend a lot of time doing something and getting confidence and not develop genuine expertise.”

The popular understanding of feedback is that a teacher tells you whether you did something right or wrong. Feedback in the information-processing sense is getting information from the environment and the reality we’re trying to influence.

“A stand-up comedian is in a rich feedback environment, because they’re standing up on the stage and people are laughing at their jokes or they’re not,” Young says. “They don’t need some expert comedian to take them aside and say, ‘This punchline doesn’t work.’ That might be helpful, but in an immediate-feedback environment, you make your jokes and find out right away.”

Asking for feedback

A meta-analysis of the research on feedback found that while there is an association between getting feedback and learning outcomes, about a third of feedback is negative, which tends to be personal and not task-oriented.

“When you give feedback that’s task-oriented, the receiver can do something with it,” Young explains.

Getting high-quality feedback will depend on how you ask for it.

Simply asking a teacher, coach or peers, “What do you think?” is requesting an evaluation on whether it is good or bad.

It opens the door to negativity.

“There’s just no way in our social nexus that someone could give you really harsh feedback and not incur some kind of cost on the relationship,” Young says. “It requires an inhuman level of resistance.”

Instead, he suggests asking, “If you were going to make this better, what would you do?”

“Avoid the whole evaluative thing,” Young advises. “Asking what would you do to improve this is no longer thinking is it good or is it bad. We’re thinking concretely about what (can be done) to fix it.”

When you invite more feedback, you can access better methods you may not discover through trial and error. You can realize solutions and methods you may never have considered before.

While practice builds fluency and confidence, you must lean on others to excel.