M2M Day 262: I blame myself

Max Deutsch
Jul 21, 2017 · 4 min read

This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For July, my goal is to solve a Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle in one sitting without any aid.

This morning, on my train ride to work, I tried to complete today’s Thursday NYT crossword puzzle.

Maybe, it was because I was tired or distracted, but it didn’t go so well…

I basically had to reveal half of the puzzle, as shown in red, which isn’t a good sign.

This miserable performance was surprising: This Thursday puzzle (the first Thursday puzzle I’ve tried this month) felt an order of magnitude more challenging than the Friday and Saturday puzzles I’ve been working on (even though Thursday puzzles are theoretically supposed to be easier).

As a means of comparison, when I got home from work today, I decided to try to complete tomorrow’s Friday puzzle (NYT crosswords are published online the evening before they are in the paper).

Weirdly, without any aid, I nearly finished the Friday puzzle. Here’s what the puzzle looked like after I checked for the first time…

So, while I can almost finish a Friday puzzle, I can barely make a dent in a Thursday puzzle. What’s going on here?

After inspecting and reading about other Thursday puzzles, I have an idea: Thursday puzzles are easier for a well-rounded puzzle solver, but for someone who has narrowly trained just for Saturdays, I’m not actually equipped to solve a Thursday.

I found out that Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday puzzles are more or less straightforward. As a result, just as a byproduct of my Saturday training, I can use my expanded mental crossword dictionary to solve these puzzles without a problem.

Friday and Saturday puzzles are stylistically the same, with slight differences in the number of extra-difficult clues. So, I’m also well-trained to take on Friday puzzles.

Thursdays puzzles, however, are special. They have there own style of cluing, which is noticeably different from the clueing on Fridays and Saturdays (as well as the Monday-Wednesdays).

Since I haven’t trained for Thursday puzzles at all, I’m completely incapable of casually cracking these new types of clues. I’m nearly competent at the most challenging Friday and Saturday puzzles, and yet fully incompetent at Thursday puzzles.

This is likely an unusual quirk, since most crossword solvers probably practice the puzzles in their intended sequence.

Interestingly, the same kind of quirk shows up in other areas of my life as well. For example, by the end of February (the month of my backflip challenge), I was able to land a standing backflip, but still couldn’t successfully execute a half-decent backwards roll.

These quirks arise from my tendency to train directly for my desired goal, not concerning myself with the supposed intermediate steps (when they aren’t relevant).

While this may seem like I’m building my skills on a shaky foundation, I’d tend to disagree.

For the most part, the “traditional” progression for learning a particular skill is just an arbitrarily made-up progression and often includes steps that aren’t essential to learning the desired skill.

For example, in language learning, most people think that they need to complete years of classroom studies, grammar exercises, online courses, etc. before they can start communicating with native speakers (because this is how everyone else seems to do it). But, in fact, this progression most likely isn’t ideal — Instead, if the goal is to speak the language, then the best path forward is to jump right to that step.

Of course, it’s hard to follow a self-guided path (and not the normal process): If you create your own progression and don’t succeed in the way you hope, it’s easy to blame yourself. However, if you follow the “normal” progression and don’t success, it’s easy to blame the process.

Blaming the process often makes us feel better than blaming ourselves, so most people opt for this option.

For me, I like the more “optimized”, personal approach, even if it means I need to occasionally squash my confidence. Usually, as consolation for temporarily squashed confidence, the outcome is better and the process is ultimately more rewarding.

In any case, after this month is finished, I’d like to circle back and figure out how to solve Thursday puzzles.

However, until then, I will continue to strive to crack a Saturday puzzle this month, even if it means temporarily sacrificing my Thursday-solving abilities.

Read the next post. Read the previous post.


Max Deutsch is an obsessive learner, product builder, guinea pig for Month to Master, and founder at Openmind.

If you want to follow along with Max’s year-long accelerated learning project, make sure to follow this Medium account.

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Max Deutsch

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Founder at https://LearnMonthly.com. Blogging at http://MonthToMaster.com. Get in touch at http://max.xyz.

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