In her 2011 book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua tells the story of her seven-year-old daughter Lulu trying to learn a piano piece called “The Little White Donkey” by Jacques Ibert. The piece requires each hand to maintain a completely different rhythm — a genuinely difficult coordination challenge.

Lulu couldn’t do it. Chua drilled her on it for an entire week, working each hand separately, over and over. But every time they tried putting the hands together, one hand would morph into the other’s rhythm and the whole thing fell apart. Finally, the day before her lesson, Lulu announced she was giving up and stomped off.

What followed was not good parenting. Chua threatened to donate Lulu’s dollhouse to the Salvation Army. She threatened to cancel Christmas. She called her daughter lazy and pathetic. They worked through dinner and into the night, Chua screaming until she lost her voice. Even Chua herself began to have doubts.

Then, out of the blue, Lulu did it. Her hands suddenly came together, each doing their own thing, just like that. A moment later she was beaming. “Mommy, look — it’s easy!” She wanted to play it over and over and wouldn’t leave the piano.

I’m not defending Amy Chua’s parenting methods. But let’s look carefully at what happened underneath the screaming.

What happened to Lulu?

Strip away the threats, the yelling, the dollhouse in the car. What’s left is this: Lulu practiced a difficult motor coordination task for a week with no visible improvement. At the moment of maximum frustration — when it looked most hopeless — she kept doing repetitions. And then the skill arrived.

The breakthrough didn’t come from a method change, a better mindset, or a step back to regroup. Lulu’s practice method was reasonable enough. Her emotional state was catastrophic — punching, thrashing, kicking, tearing up the sheet music. Chua wouldn’t let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom. The skill arrived anyway. Motor learning was happening underneath the frustration the entire time. Lulu just couldn’t feel it.

Three findings from the research

Three lines of research help explain what Lulu experienced — and why it matters for anyone building a complex motor skill like stenography.

1. Improvement accumulates invisibly.

The power law of practice, first documented in 1959 by Crossman studying cigar-rolling operators, describes a consistent pattern: performance improves as a function of accumulated repetitions. The gains are largest at the beginning and get progressively smaller — but they continue to accrue over very long time horizons. Crossman’s operators were still measurably improving after ten million repetitions and seven years.

This describes a general trajectory, not a guarantee about each individual session. But the overall arc holds: repeated practice is required for improvement to accumulate, and that improvement is often invisible session to session. Lulu’s week of “useless” drilling was following this arc. The micro-gains were building beneath her awareness and eventually crossed a threshold where the skill became visible.

2. Plateaus are consolidation, not stagnation.

Bryan and Harter’s pioneering 1899 study of telegraph operators found that learners would hit plateaus — periods of weeks where performance seemed completely stuck — and then suddenly break through. Their explanation: at each plateau, the learner’s brain is transitioning from a lower-level processing strategy to a higher-level one. Letter-by-letter processing gives way to word-level processing, which gives way to phrase-level processing. Each transition requires continued practice to complete.

The critical implication: a plateau is the worst possible time to reduce practice volume. Continued repetitions help the brain complete its reorganization. Fewer repetitions slow that process down. What feels rational during a plateau — stepping back, rethinking your approach, waiting until you feel ready — is often the opposite of what the learning system needs, which is continued exposure.

3. Volume is what the evidence consistently points to.

It would be strange if practice quality didn’t matter at all. Intuitively, practicing with good feedback, targeting your weaknesses, and structuring your sessions thoughtfully should produce better results than mindless repetition. K. Anders Ericsson — the psychologist whose research inspired Malcolm Gladwell’s popular “10,000-Hour Rule” — spent his career arguing exactly this: that “deliberate practice,” carefully designed and individually tailored, is what truly drives expertise.

But when researchers tried to demonstrate this empirically, the results were surprisingly elusive. Macnamara, Hambrick, and Oswald’s 2014 meta-analysis of 88 studies and over 11,000 participants found that the amount of practice people accumulated was a meaningful but incomplete predictor of performance — explaining roughly 26% of variance in chess, 21% in music, and 18% in sports. Important, but far from the whole story. That led to a natural question: does it matter how you practice, not just how much? Ericsson insisted it did — that only practice meeting his strict criteria for “deliberate practice” (teacher-designed, supervised, individually tailored) would show the full effect. But when Hambrick and colleagues (2020) reviewed the evidence, the correlation between performance and “true” deliberate practice was not significantly different from the correlation with broader, self-directed practice.

This doesn’t prove that quality is irrelevant. It means that after thirty years of research, the independent contribution of practice quality — above and beyond how much you practice — has been remarkably difficult to isolate.

What this means for steno

If you are currently practicing steno and you feel like it isn’t working — you’re not getting faster, your accuracy isn’t improving, the next speed still feels out of reach — the research suggests your practice is very likely working anyway. Motor learning often accumulates beneath the threshold of perception. Sessions that feel unproductive are still building the micro-gains that will become visible over weeks and months.

So protect your practice hours. They are the single most important factor you can control. If you have additional time and energy, by all means think about how to make those hours more effective — get feedback from a teacher or mentor, review your weak areas, refine your practice structure, fall in love with steno again. Quality likely helps, but the hours are the foundation. And when you’re stuck and it feels like nothing is working, remember Lulu: the strategy was already good enough. What was missing was more time for it to work.