Learning a New Skill Is a Struggle — Find Pleasure in It
In her book Mindset Carol Dweck describes a trap people can fall into — in particular, if they have easily learned some things and been praised for their “talent” or “gift” or “intelligence.” When they then encounter some subject or skill that proves difficult, some will quickly throw in the towel because they assume that for that particular thing they do not have the “talent” required, so they abandon their efforts rather than persist. They trap themselves into learning only those things that come easily to them and miss out on learning things that they find initially are difficult.
This learning resistance is abated if they can view those early difficulties in learning something as a pleasure and promise, though that’s not easy. A person may well dislike learning new ideas that contradict old notions with which they’ve become comfortable — so comfortable, in fact, that those familiar ideas are seen as a part of their identity, of who they are. A new idea can seem like a direct personal attack.
And that’s just new ideas: learning new skills may feel even more unpleasant since a novice in the initial stages almost always is clumsy and awkward, and that can be frustrating. Parents will recall how irritable and angry a toddler becomes when s/he first starts learning how to walk. Crawling is no longer good enough, but this new thing of walking is too difficult, and meltdowns into tears and tantrums are frequent in the transition from crawling to toddling.
Of course, the very young have little choice in the matter. They must learn to sit up, to crawl, to walk, to talk, to feed themselves, to go to potty, to dress themselves. Each step is for a while a frustrating struggle, but you’ve doubtless noticed that those same skills, now that you’ve mastered them, no longer arouse such strong emotions. They now are such a matter of routine that you feel no trace of your earlier emotions, though certainly those emotions were intense at the time.
Adults — who in general can choose what they do — spend most of their time exercising skills long since mastered, both at work and at home. One exception I’ve noticed in a business context: lower-ranking adults generally have no choice in learning new things. A clerk is simply required to master the intricacies of a new copier system or new accounting software or a new phone system. I once observed a company president who wanted to transfer a call on their new phone system somewhat piteously call out to his secretary to please come in and do it for him. She had had to learn the new system; he had easily avoided it — doubtless because as president he didn’t like feeling awkward and ignorant, the very feelings a novice inevitably experiences.
Because they spend almost all their time exercising skills they’ve already mastered, adults who begin to learn a new skill are often terrible students. They know clearly what they want to do, and they are acutely aware of the difference between that and what they are doing in those first tries—which they view as failures rather than as practice runs. When they try to learn to play the piano, or to speak a foreign language, or to cook a meal (for those adults just learning to cook), or any other new skill, they look as their experience as failures. If they have become unaccustomed to the early stages of learning, the novice’s natural awkwardness and uncertainty feel almost toxic.
Adults unpracticed in learning have forgotten how as children they used play as a mode of learning. As they played with what they were trying to learn, they gained familiarity and knowledge and skill in a low-stakes situation: failures didn’t matter — “failure” didn’t happen — because they were just playing.
I once walked by a group of firefighters gathered around their new hook-and-ladder truck, and it was obvious that they were playing with it — running the ladder up and down, then one riding the ladder as another sat at the controls and turned it. They were clearly having fun, and they clearly were playing with a purpose: to learn the new system and to practice new skills.
Forgetting how learning once began as play, some—particularly those who have relied on “talent” — will seek immediate success in accomplishment, rather than viewing their initial experience as exploration, with no other goal — to try things to see what happens. In the “play-to-learn” mindset, the awkwardness they feel is viewed as a good sign rather than a bad thing. It indicates that they really are onto something new, going in a new direction, learning new things. It is a signpost to a new area open to mastery, an unexplored wilderness of riches.
So the solution to learning resistance is to adjust one’s attitude, a process described well in Dweck’s book. Don’t draw back from that that initial awkwardness but look for it as a welcome harbinger of a new skill. View it as the color that gladdens a gold prospector’s heart, a sign that the mother lode is near and can be found higher up with a bit more effort.
Focus your attention initially on your progress (which in the early stages of learning something new is remarkably good) rather than on your results (in the early stages best used only to measure progress). Your initial efforts are intended only to gain familiarity and experience. Criticism — especially self-criticism — would be misplaced. The initial trials and false starts are all successful in letting you see what happens with your various experiments. Those trials (and their outcomes, good or bad) are exactly how one learns. View what you’re doing as play, not as a white-knuckled effort to achieve a good result. The only result you want is a net of experience to catch skills as they develop, enabling you to practice them more — and better.
If you have continued to learn new things and thus are a practiced learner, the emotions raised by the initial difficulties are not a problem because they are familiar. You’ve been here before, and often, and you know how it goes. You have, through practice and experience, learned how to learn. You’re in the whitewater stage of learning, and you actively enjoy it instead of wishing you were on a calm pond. This is the exciting time, when you’re navigating a turbulent and rapid-changing stream, alert to what’s happening. You know that soon enough the rush will slow and you will know what to expect and where you are and the wild thrill — the confusion, disorientation, awkwardness, and uncertainty — will be gone, so you enjoy it while it lasts.
In contrast, those who have for a long period avoided learning new things find themselves no longer familiar with the process, the experience, and the emotions. For them that initial awkwardness and uncertainty, alien to their daily adult lives, are unfamiliar and uncomfortable and perhaps even frightening, particularly if they are accustomed to feeling in control and knowledgeable. Unpracticed in learning, they fail to see the implicit promise of difficulties, that there is much to be gained from the effort. They are acutely aware of the irritating grain of sand and don’t realize that it can produce a pearl: a skill whose mastery will produce great satisfaction and whose exercise will provide continuing enjoyment. To take a random example, men who master the skills of traditional shaving find that shaving becomes enjoyable, and they begin each morning with a pleasurable ritual.
Dweck in her book describes some who did enjoy the early struggles and difficulties. These were already aware that the greater the initial difficulty, the greater reward that mastery brings. They did indeed approach their learning in a spirit of play, and they enjoyed their progress as a journey, observing things along the way to their destination of mastery.
I went through this recently when I substantially changed my diet, switching (overnight, after doing some reading and research) from a low-carb/keto diet to a whole-food plant-based diet, and at first I floundered. I found myself stymied when I tried to plan a meal — I simply didn’t know where to begin. In my former diet I had a familiar routine: choose the meat (or fish or fowl), decide how to cook it (roast, grill, braise, whatever), and then decide what vegetables would accompany it.
Without the familiar starting point I didn’t know where to begin, and I didn’t know what a “complete” meal looked like so I didn’t know where to stop. I felt at sea, with no solid footing. But I have plunged into new things frequently enough that this disorientation was familiar and even enjoyable. I didn’t panic because (a) the disorientation was fun/interesting rather than threatening, much like getting dizzy, and (b) I know from experience that as I keep at it the fog will lift and landmarks will materialize — new landmarks, as I get to know the new terrain. I knew the disorientation and difficulty were temporary, so I was interested to see how they would disperse.
Changing one’s diet is difficult because you have to abandon patterns of eating that have been learned so well that they no longer require conscious thought. Just as you don’t have to think much to get around your own town or neighborhood, your regular diet is easy because it’s based on familiar dishes and practiced routines. (See Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, by Timothy Wilson, for more on how our adaptive unconscious runs our lives in background.)
But when you move to a new city you find that there is no reservoir of unconscious knowledge, and you have to give conscious thought and careful attention and a fair amount of effort just to find your way around. The same is true when you move to a new way of eating: at first you must give a lot of thought and attention to figuring out a new repertoire of “standard” dishes and meals. But over time, navigating the new city or the new diet becomes easy once again as new patterns are figured out and practiced enough to be absorbed into your unconscious knowledge, and easy routines again emerge.
I particularly enjoy this transition period, from confusion to understanding, from disorientation to routine. To feel things come together and start to connect and make sense is a true pleasure — a pleasure available only when you are willing to persist through the confusion and awkwardness.
