Train hard and improve your skills, or stop training and forget your skills. Training just enough to maintain your level is the worst idea.
Doesn’t this depend somewhat on the relevance of the skill to the goal? My skills at cooking are reasonably adequate to the environment in which I live. I would classify them as better than average, but decidedly amateur. I don’t particularly want to prioritise them over my skill at playing a musical instrument, for which I get paid, but I wouldn’t like to lose too much of what cooking skills I do have as that would make my life more inconvenient, and certainly less enjoyable.
Within my work, musicianship can be broken down into a good many skills, all of which I need to maintain at their current levels to remain in employment, and some of which it may be worth my time and effort to improve. For my church job, if I were to try to improve my organ pedal technique at the expense of maintaining my ability to learn five hymns and two voluntaries per service to reasonable performance standard, I would not hold my position long. There is a limit to how much time I can spend practising each week, and so the pedal technique, while important, will progress more slowly than if I did not have to maintain my skill at playing manuals-only (as I am also a pianist this comes much more easily to me). When my pedal technique catches up with my manual technique I will be able to re-destribute my practice time to attempt improvement of both.
I’m having a hard time thinking of situations where there are no skills which are best kept at maintenance level, though it may be that for some people such extreme specialisation is efficient.
Doesn’t this depend somewhat on the relevance of the skill to the goal? My skills at cooking are reasonably adequate to the environment in which I live. I would classify them as better than average, but decidedly amateur. I don’t particularly want to prioritise them over my skill at playing a musical instrument, for which I get paid, but I wouldn’t like to lose too much of what cooking skills I do have as that would make my life more inconvenient, and certainly less enjoyable.
Within my work, musicianship can be broken down into a good many skills, all of which I need to maintain at their current levels to remain in employment, and some of which it may be worth my time and effort to improve. For my church job, if I were to try to improve my organ pedal technique at the expense of maintaining my ability to learn five hymns and two voluntaries per service to reasonable performance standard, I would not hold my position long. There is a limit to how much time I can spend practising each week, and so the pedal technique, while important, will progress more slowly than if I did not have to maintain my skill at playing manuals-only (as I am also a pianist this comes much more easily to me). When my pedal technique catches up with my manual technique I will be able to re-destribute my practice time to attempt improvement of both.
I’m having a hard time thinking of situations where there are no skills which are best kept at maintenance level, though it may be that for some people such extreme specialisation is efficient.