M2M Day 323: I almost finished prematurely
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For September, my goal is to continuously freestyle rap for three minutes.
I have a bit of a problem: randomwordgenerator.com, the site I’ve been using to inspire my freestyle raps, is currently broken and not generating random words.
Today, as a result, I needed to turn to a new site for my word generation. Sadly, this new site doesn’t let me specify the number of syllables in the random words (I’ve been selecting “two”), so I had to cope with everything from one-syllable words to four-syllable words.
Additionally, this new site uses many different, more obscure words (versus randomwordgenerator.com).
Theoretically, neither of these changes should be a problem if my freestyling skills are generalizable…
…but my freestyling skills aren’t generalizable (at least, not fully so), as I found out today.
It turns out, I’m much worse using this new site. Not only do I find the three-syllable and four-syllable words difficult, but I’m also oddly finding the one-syllable words challenging. I’m also generally less quick with all of these new words.
Using this new site, here’s what I sound like…
Despite my freestyling decline, this actually a really happy accident: In my mind, as of yesterday, I thought I was getting insanely good at freestyling, when instead, I was just getting more and more used to the two-syllable words on randomwordgenerator.com.
I’d guess there are at least 5000 two-syllable words on randomwordgenerator.com, but I’ve practiced enough, where I’ve seen many of them.
Before today, I was in the mindset of “I’m pretty good at this point, let me just polish things up before my final performance”, which would have incorporated randomwordgenerator.com (it still might).
However, by being forced to use a new site today, I discovered a number of new weaknesses in my freestyling skillset that I’ll be able to address over the next two weeks.
In other words, I’m going to continue my aggressive upward climb towards freestyle mastery, rather than prematurely finishing the climb in an effort to polish my current skills.
I’m glad this unexpected “problem” allowed me to see that 1. I have so much more time left in the month to significantly improve, and 2. I have so much more room to significantly improve.
It’s a good thing I was forced outside my comfort zone. After all, this is the only way I’ll truly come face-to-face with my limitations, giving me a target to aim for and the hunger to keep going.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
