Practice doesn’t make perfect. It makes it permanent.

That’s what my baseball coach, Bob Shaw, taught me. He used to say, “If you’re practicing it wrong, you’re only going to get good at doing it wrong” (or something like that).

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to wonder: what’s actually wrong with being good at doing it wrong?

Being left-handed, Jimi Hendrix found a workaround with a right-handed guitar because left-handed models were rare and expensive. He taught himself to play right-handed guitars upside down.

Jazz guitarist Tal Farlow taught himself to play the guitar on a mandolin tuned like a ukulele. He used the four highest strings for the melody and chord structure, with the two lowest for bass counterpoint, which he played with his thumb.

Their “wrong” practice became the source of their unique sound.

Now, I’m no Hendrix, and before writing this, I didn’t know who Farlow was. But I’ve never taken a drafting course, and I went to college for business management, so I’m pretty sure I’ve been practicing "architecture" wrong.

And yet I’m still doing it after all these years.

I’ll come back to that. First, let’s talk about practice.

The word practice traces its roots to the Greek praktikos, meaning “concerned with action.” Over time, it came to mean applying knowledge through doing—turning theory into reality. That’s a powerful concept for those of us in building design. Our “practice” is not just a business we run (noun); it’s the continual process of refining what we do and how we think (verb). Every drawing, model, and client conversation is another chance to apply, test, and improve our craft.

In that sense, design is never finished—it’s practiced.

Like a musician or an athlete, the designer sharpens skills through repetition, experimentation, and reflection. The more we practice, the more natural creativity becomes.

When we describe our firms as practices, we’re acknowledging something fundamental: architecture is not static knowledge to be possessed, but a living craft to be cultivated and grown.

That captures something profound about being a design professional. Growth isn’t about chasing a single milestone; it’s about continually becoming better, broader, and more capable than you were yesterday. And that’s precisely what practice is about.

At AIBD, we believe practice and growth go hand in hand. Whether through roundtables, certification programs, or events like the Summer Conference and the Coffee with Bernie show, our mission is to help you practice better—and grow further—with every connection you make.

This past week, I led a "design charrette" at a developer’s office. In four hours, I produced a 3,600-square-foot semi-custom spec model. They loved it. “Will you win an award for this?” the company’s CEO asked.

Not likely.

From a floor-plan perspective, it was like every other version of what I’ve been designing in South Florida for 20+ years—indoor-outdoor living, open kitchen, split-bedroom layouts, and a covered lanai.

Is it me? Have I been practicing the same thing over and over, losing my creativity? Is it the market that keeps wanting the same thing, but “newer”? Have I done myself a service or a disservice by getting really good at a certain floor plan layout?

Those questions hit on something every designer faces at some point: the tension between mastery and monotony.

Does it have to mean your creativity is gone?

Not necessarily. More often, it means your practice has matured to the point where much of what you do feels second nature—and with that mastery comes the uneasy feeling that growth has slowed.

Now and then, I come across a seasoned designer who says, “There’s nothing more to learn.” Usually, it’s not about the absence of knowledge; it’s about the state of their perspective.

When someone says that, it can mean:

• Burnout or boredom—projects stop asking new questions, so your mind quietly concludes, “I’ve seen it all.”
• A narrowed definition of learning—if learning only means a new code section, new software, or new detail, then yes, that well can feel dry after a few decades.
• Local mastery—within a certain building type, market, or delivery method, you’ve seen most of the patterns and can predict the moves.

If practice makes permanent, then long-term practice in a narrow groove makes that groove feel like the whole world. You’ve reinforced a particular way of seeing problems, solving them, and framing what “good work” looks like. That’s not a failure; it’s exactly what repetition does.

But it carries a risk: once you’re excellent in that groove, the friction that drives learning drops to nearly zero. Work starts to feel less like discovery and more like maintenance.

So the feeling of “nothing more to learn” is often the natural byproduct of being very good at a very specific game.

What is actually left to learn? I’m glad I asked.

Even if the technical side feels saturated, there are entire domains that remain inexhaustible:

• Teaching and legacy: transferring judgment, not just information—mentoring, structuring a studio, codifying what you “just know.”
• Business and models of practice: pricing, positioning, succession, collaboration, design processes, and productizing parts of what you do.
• Adjacent lenses on the same work: how people really live in your spaces, how light and proportion affect well‑being, how technology changes what’s possible.
• Depth over breadth: resilience, aging in place, embodied carbon, adaptability—within the typologies you already know well.

In other words, the content of what you design may feel fully mapped, but the meaning, impact, and systems around it are practically bottomless.

With all that in mind, maybe this is a more accurate internal statement:

For a building designer, those “other valleys” might look like:

• Shifting from primarily doing the work to teaching others how to think.
• Moving from single projects to systems: standards, templates, methodologies, curriculum
• Moving from serving a market to shaping it: advocacy, codes, public education, mentoring the next generation

In that sense, viewing your firm as a practice still holds: you give yourself permission to keep learning, but the field of learning changes. It’s less about “How do I lay out another great split plan?” and more about “How do I design a profession, a community, or a legacy that outlives my individual plans?”

So, if this week’s project feels like déjà vu, remember—you’re not stuck. You’re standing at the edge of the next level of your practice.