When you’re starting to learn something new, you probably have an image in your mind of what you want to be able to accomplish. Often it’s much more sophisticated than what you can manage right now. And that’s fine.

You can see the end results of experts who’ve created great things before you, and you look at the stuff that you’re creating right now, and you think you’re never going to get there. The techniques seem awkward, nothing that you try seems to work, and you’re embarrassed to show anything that you’ve been working on to anybody. Basically, you don’t see the path from here to there.

You may not realize it yet, but this is the perfect state to be in when starting something new. You should revel in this awareness of your own inadequacy. This is the raw, honest proof that you understand what you’re going for, and you are blessed with the perceptive skill to see the difference between what you’re creating now and what you want to accomplish.

Please don’t stop now.

Rather than let this slow you down, you should congratulate yourself. There are many people who never get past this point. If you find yourself feeling completely hopeless with a new skill, remind yourself that this feeling means that you are looking in the right direction, and seeing the real obstacles you need to tackle to get from where you are to where you want to be.

Muscle Memory

And how are you going to get from this position of perceived inadequacy to the kind of mastery that you desire? You have to build the muscle memory, in your brain, your hands, or any other part of you that’s going to be involved in accomplishing your vision.

Ultimately it is muscle memory that will allow you to go from idea to creation. The great artists are not simply capable of making what they want out of inspiration and raw materials because they woke up one morning with the perfect vision. They can create these things because they know the techniques intimately. Their hands have gone through the motions again and again and again, until they achieve complete control over all of the tiny, intricate aspects. For those who have put in the time and attention, there is already a direct path from vision to creation.

Coming from the outside, seeing the final works of other creatives, you probably never get a chance to see the failures that went into the trash can along the way. It doesn’t serve the artist to expose the effort that went into developing a craft. But you should realize that book on the shelf went through dozens if not hundreds of revisions. That beautifully designed chair was the result of weeks and months of sketches and construction, dozens of iterations, and a history of failures before the final result could be achieved. That musical theme is the final product of an unheard symphony of lessons learned.

Thank yourself for hanging in there.

Almost no creative skill comes as naturally and easily as it may appear. We all need to train ourselves to do the grunt work necessary to develop competency with the techniques in order to be in the position to create something amazing.

Building Sandcastles

An image I try to keep in mind when I feel myself drawn toward a new skill is the excitement of children building sandcastles at the beach. One of the wonderful things about how children play at building sandcastles is that a sandcastle is not permanent.

Like a decorative mandala, created by monks over the course of days and then blown away by the wind, a sandcastle is a very temporary structure. There is no commitment when you’re building a sandcastle. The Sandcastle is not something that’s going to live forever, or something that you can preserve for any practical use the future. You may be able to take a photograph of it, but the structure itself is a temporary structure in an indefensible public space, created only for the enjoyment of the creation and likely destruction.

Imagine that you took the new skill that you’re trying to develop, and started building sandcastles with it. What would a sandcastle look like in the context of what you want to be able to do? If you’re an aspiring writer, would a sandcastle be a short story with no verbs that you read once to yourself and then discard? If you want to be a marketer, would a sandcastle be a press release for a product that could never exist? If you dream of becoming a chef, would a sandcastle be a recipe based entirely on color, with no concern for smell, taste, or other considerations?

Just keep moving forward…

How could you remix the pieces that go into creating something so you can play with construction, without any concerns about the result; knowing that there will be no permanent use for result.

Achieving Basic Competency

Learning anything new is a process of error and error and error, trial and trial, maybe a little bit of success, more error, and finally, maybe, a sense of accomplishment. It doesn’t come quickly and easily, no matter what the press release says, or how it may appear to the casual observer. Some people who have tried to measure these things claim that it takes 10,000 hours of work on a specific skill before you can master it fully (as if full mastery were something objective that could be measured). But casual competency can take months if not years, depending on the type of skill you’re trying to develop.

Getting from zero to competency is one of the most challenging aspects of learning a new skill. With the image in your mind of what you want to achieve, you look at the work that you’re actually creating and you can’t help but be frustrated.

Your work looks nothing like what you saw on your mind. It doesn’t sound anything like the symphony or speech you imagined yourself performing. The functionality of the gears is clunky, the design of the interface is amateurish. If you were looking at it as a consumer, you would see all of the flaws immediately. This is not at all what you were hoping to create. It can stop you in your tracks, and keep you from moving forward.

But you are moving in the right direction.

The ability to see all those flaws in your own work is a blessing. And you can easily miss that fact if you inhibit your progress by focusing too early on the end result, before you learn to enjoy the process.

How a Child Learns

A crucial advantage that children have over adults when exposing themselves to a new skill is their uninhibited nature. Children have not yet learned the consequences of failure. To be a child is to act without concern or awareness about the product of your actions. You see this when children play. They jump randomly from concept to concept, trying things out and testing them as they go. It’s not about attempting to create something permanent; it’s more about playing with all of the different possibilities.

Notice how a baby learns to make words. The first thing most babies do is burble little sounds. A baby doesn’t immediately try to speak a full sentence, and then give up if that sentence doesn’t communicate exactly what that baby intended to say. To a baby, language is a toy to explore, Just like everything else in the world. A baby makes a sound, and can hear the sound being made, and it’s like a new toy. Maybe the baby will start to compare those sounds to the sounds that other people are making. One day, the baby may notice that people are responding to the sounds, and a new sense power comes; a new toy to play with. When a baby is learning language, it’s not about writing Shakespeare, it’s about experimenting and exploring.

What if we could take that same sense of wonder and carefree play, and apply it to the kinds of skills that we want to develop in ourselves? What if we had the ability to turn off the judge who is telling us that what we’re creating doesn’t match the quality of the final products that we want to achieve?

Encourage yourself to move forward.

Imagine yourself as a baby in relation to the skill that you’re trying to develop. Picture expressive talent as somewhere fresh and new, in where you have absolutely no inhibitions and no expectations. What’s the first thing you would examine? What corner would you turn up look underneath and see what’s there? How could you use this sense of delight and wonder to your advantage, to figure out every nuance and permutation of this unfamiliar and enticing landscape?

Creation and Destruction

When you build a sandcastle, you can look forward to taking as much pleasure in kicking it over as there was in building it in the first place. You knew all along that your sandcastle would be temporary. Part of the thrill is putting all of the effort into creating something as beautiful and amazing as you possibly can, using a new skill that you don’t have to prove to anyone, and then erasing it and starting over again.

There’s a freedom that comes from knowing that what you’re creating is not going to have any practical value when you’re done. If you’re a kid making mud pies in the sand, it’s not like you’re seriously expecting anybody to eat them. The pleasure is in the creating of what you imagine to be a pie, not making something the family can have for dessert. This is not about satisfying an audience or a customer. This is about the experience of creation and destruction.

There are so many places in life where building sandcastles can be helpful. Professions such as programming and web development are areas where sandcastle building has become recognized as a standard way of learning new skills. When you talk to a programmer about how to learn a programming language, the first thing that you usually hear is that the best way to learn is to build something. You don’t learn a programming language by reading all of the books. You learn by building something, figuring out what the limitations and opportunities are, then taking it down and building it again.

There’s nothing real standing in your way.

When learning a language, it’s not about memorizing all the words and rules before you can start making use of them. The key to learning a new language is to get the most basic skills you need to start talking or reading, and getting started. This is how immersion learning works. As you practice the few phrases that you already know, you start to realize exactly where the edges of your knowledge are. You develop the desire to fill in the gaps in that learning, and out of necessity you memorize exactly the pieces that you need in order to take yourself to the next level. Step-by-step, you’re creating throwaway situations in which you can experiment with the language, fail, and try again.

Getting Started with Sandcastles

None of this should be new to you. This is a process that you’ve gone through again and again in your life, ever since you were a small child. Anytime that you needed to develop a new ability, like walking, you started by taking awkward steps, playing with the movements, developing the muscles, and consequently noticing the results.

You probably didn’t walk across a room for the first time because you needed something across the room. That sparkly trinket may have gotten you up on your feet, but while you were learning how to move yourself around, but you were playing with the act of walking.

Look at the result that you’re trying to learn how to achieve. Imagine it reduced to a sandcastle that you can happily build, play with, and destroy. What would that sandcastle look like? How can you dress yourself up like whoever you want to be, and play in the same sandbox, without the inhibition of feeling that you have to produce something for someone else?

Start building sandcastles today.

Don’t disrespect play. Building and destroying a sandcastle may be the fastest way to familiarize your brain and your body with what it takes to do the things that you want to do with your life.