One thing I learnt as a child from being forced by my parents to learn violin is that form and technique really matters. Violin is an instrument where if you don't have the right form or a teacher to supervise or correct your technique constantly, you'll just hit a hard wall on how good you can get.
This would go on to shape my compulsion to do things "right" especially after I reached adulthood. Interestingly, when I was a teenager I would still be pretty sloppy and just do things based on vibes. I'm not sure what changed but during my Uni years I would be pretty obsessed with doing things right. Tutorials and guides became my go to on Google searches and YouTube, and later ChatGPT when it became good.
And yet more recently I'm pondering if I'm too obsessed over form and technique. For instance, as I've stopped playing the violin and picked up the guitar in May 2024, I've realised that technique and form can distract you from the underlying core purpose, which is connecting to and making music. This is even more true with the drums where players like Buddy Rich would be totally self-taught and be considered a great.
So there must be a spectrum of things from what requires pedantic, precise, structured practice and what should be learnt through raw repetition, feel and intuition. Most skills tend to be in the middle and is a combination of an effective combination of both.
I did some research online, and apparently Rich Masters' "reinvestment" theory can somewhat explain some of my personal experiences when performing under pressure. Since I like to do things "correct" and "proper" and am taught with explicit rules, I find that I've always struggled to perform under pressure. Personally I feel like I get overwhelmed with thoughts and start panicking or freezing. All the pro musicians I watch on YouTube often talk about how the best way to overcome stage anxiety is to not even need to think about what you are playing and doing it entirely by feel!
At my Thursday night MMA trainings, I also talked with my training partners about how the best pro fighters don't fight with the "right technique". Boxing gyms and teachers love to yap on and on about form and technique and yet the best pro fighters almost always fight in strange ways. I think it speaks to how intuition, and picking a strategy and style that just works for your brain and your body is by far more important than performing dance like precision hip rotations or head kicks.
As such, the best practical advice here is probably to figure out upfront what sort of technique/practice/structure is most important and let intuition fill in the gaps. For instance, in MMA wrestling and BJJ, technique and position can completely dominate a match as your opponent is just 10 steps ahead of you mentally, and yet in striking, super unorthodox styles can be effective at a world class level. You want to avoid the teachers that shows you heaps of techniques to feel useful and good about themselves. Real teachers are great for real time feedback, especially if it's a physical activity.
Another potential trick is to study the greats. How do they do it? Every ballet dancer had to have rigorous technical training and strict routines. The best artists on the other hand seem to have natural born intuition and creative ideas and express it in all sorts of random and novel ways. You can study the trajectories they took, the level of guidance they received, and how differently they perform compared to each other. Then you can work backwards to figure out what you will enjoy and can achieve in a particular discipline.
The third tip is to figure out when structure is needed in your journey and where you are in your journey. For instance, young children can be ear trained super quickly and gain intuition for music and notes way faster than adults and can rely on more of their intuition upfront. In violin, eventually good form just becomes second nature and as you become a more advanced player, your feel for the music begins to matter more and more. In esports like Valorant, you want a robust knowledge of what to do, but your actual in game decision making as you get better needs to be system one and immediate. I think rules and techniques are sort of like the scaffolding that supports your skill development. Too much and it's all scaffolding and too little, you won't have a strong enough foundation to build upon. You need it with different amounts in different places at different times.