A friend told me an interesting story about his grandfather.
Back in his middle-aged days, the grandfather was was worried about his fitness. He noticed he didn’t do much exercise, but as we all know, getting one’s ass from being a non-exercising ass to being an exercising ass is a pain in the… neck.
But then he noticed there was something he did every day. He went down to the cellar to get one thing or another. So he thought about how he could use that to become fit, and eventually came up with a solution.
He attached a metal bar above the cellar door. And every time he went down to the cellar, he would simply pull himself up on that bar as many times as he could.
At first, he could barely manage one pull-up, if that. But he persevered, and was soon doing 2… then 3…. then 5.
Cut a few years forward. He kept up his habit every single day, and would now routinely do 20-25 pull-ups every time he went to the cellar.
He didn’t hire a coach, or put together a complicated training plan. He used the oldest and simplest method of achieving mastery – keep showing up.
…
Normally, I’d be the first to point out that practice methods make a huge difference to how fast you learn.
But sometimes, it’s not about learning a skill as fast as possible. Sometimes you simply become better and better, without even thinking about it.
I got thinking about this concept when reading an awesome webcomic about a bunch of wolves in Ireland.
I got captivated by the story, and as I read through the archive of the comic, I noticed how the author’s drawing style steadily kept improving. She started off pretty good (and definitely way better at drawing than me)… but by the time I read through the 5-year archive of the comic, she’d become absolutely amazing.
Yet I don’t think she ever thought about becoming a better artist while she was drawing it. Or, rather, it wasn’t her main motivation. She simply kept drawing because she enjoyed creating the story, and how other people interacted with it. She kept showing up, and became a master at drawing.
It really takes two things – showing up and a willingness to keep trying new things and improve. (The webcomic author several times commented on how she was experimenting with different ways of drawing backgrounds.). But with those two ingredients, you can often master a skill without putting any noticeable effort into it.
It’s not that it doesn’t take effort. But you don’t notice it, because you’re just doing something you enjoy.
So ask yourself the following:
What skill would you like to develop?
What enjoyable activity could you do instead, where you develop this skill as a by-product?
What’s stopping you?
(image courtesy of ghetsu)
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Hmm, i would say that the way you train yourself in a skill is perfectly described by marxist dialectics.
One of the elements is simple improvement, analogous to a quantitative growth. You just steadily become better and better at what you do – like when you are learning multiplication tables, and every next time, you are slightly faster and make slightly less errors.
The other is a improvement in technique which is analogous to a qualitative growth. This happens discontinuously. Something just clicks, and you start doing things a new way. In the beginning you might be worse off than before, but very quickly , the new way outpaces the old. The most marked example is noticing a possible new strategy in an RTS.
Now the bad thing, especially for someone like me is that to your brain, only linear extrapolations make sense.
Therefore, when you start doing something, it is easy to go “i will never be any good” because all you can imagine is the result of a quantitative improvement on the current qualitative level you are on – before it happens , by definition you just cannot imagine the other improvement just like you cannot imagine knowing something…
In other words, when picking something up, it’s best to try not to worry about performance – it just does not give you results
Thanks Vlad for sharing this
Willingless to learn new things is needed. Otherwise we won’t grow and we stay in our comfort zone.
.-= Dia´s last blog ..Power of expectation =-.
@danman:
I noticed something similar when I was learning to snowboard. I decided that I wasn’t bothered about the incremental improvement much, and instead wanted to master the technique as soon as possible, and leave the incremental improvement after that.
So I didn’t worry about falling at all. Instead, I simply wanted to get a feel for how the snowboard reacts when I put my weight on which foot, how it reacts when I tilt my feet forward or backward, and so on.
Long story short, I fell about 50 times on the first day. A bit less on the second day. But by day 3, I pretty much mastered riding comfortably with my left foot forward, and focused on riding with the other one forward. Which I got the hang of by day 4.
Sure, I knew how snow behaves after years of skiing, which made the learning much easier. But I still think I only made such fast progress because I didn’t care about falling, and instead focused on learning the technique first.
@Dia:
Exactly. One of my friends has a blog called “The Discomfort Zone”. I think that name perfectly describes where you want to spend a big chunk of your time, if you want to grow
Vlad, there is so much right with this article it is hard to know where to start!
Simple, small, daily effort is the best way that I know of to accomplish a goal or a dream. Little things add up over time, much in the way that water creates huge amazing natural wonders.
Given enough time, and enough effort, anything is possible. Thanks for sharing!