It’s easy to see the perfect practice as the one where you don’t make any mistakes; To fence with your friends and celebrate a flawless night; To have the teacher pass by without giving any corrections.

Yet we must ask what is the purpose of practice if not to make mistakes? If you’re training without error you must not be training very hard. If you’re fencing without flaw you must be focusing only in your strengths or not educating your partners enough to exploit your weaknesses.

Review the success of your practice through the challenges you face and the errors you unearth. Push yourself to your limits so you can expand them. Focus not on results but on process.

The beauty of a focus on process and error is that you always gain. Facing challenges will always make you a better person. Results allow only for a binary outcome — approval or no approval, success or failure. Long term journeys are so much more complex than that. The greatest success needs for a great deal of failure.

Make your next training objective to try your hardest and yet still fail. Then you know you’re truly setting the right goal posts.