Tried Something New. Turns Out I Sucked.
Rolling Backward Down the Learning Curve
I’m somehow STILL delusional. Even though I’ve been writing, learning, and trying new things for quite a while now, I still pick up a new thing expecting to be pretty good. On the outside looking in, everything seems a bit too simple or a bit too easy. Once we start to actually do the thing, however, its suddenly much harder.
Hitting that wall, or maybe more accurately, starting to scale the incline of the learning curve suddenly kills our early momentum. Often, it also steals that young excitement or ambition. I recently started writing in a different way then I was used to — something that wasn’t novel writing or article-style like this. While I’m not far enough along in that process to really share anything I’ve learned, I was reminded about how harsh that early learning process can be. Since this has happened various times for me, I have a general course correction I use whenever learning starts to become miserable.
It Takes Time
And, unfortunately, I don’t mean a couple days or a couple weeks. Being extremely generous, it can take upwards of 20 hours of intense, high-focused practice to start to understand and be able to do a task. Not even to be particularly good at it. If you’re only able to dedicate an hour or two a day, in order to be “solid” at something, you’d need at least a few months. Even more so if you have no experience in anything related to the thing you’re trying to learn.
Acknowledging this is a good way to reframe how to look and judge your progress. You really can’t tell how well you’re adapting to new information without first acquiring lots of information. And, sadly, that takes a time investment.
But reframing things this way is a good way to remind yourself you’re just getting started. It tempers expectations, not in terms of lowering effort, but increasing patience. And learning anything, even enough to be “okay” at it takes tons of patience.
Get Feedback
Feedback might be the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to a “cheat sheet.” If what you’re practicing is something that can be experienced by a someone else (learning a new instrument, writing a song, drafting a novel), then asking other people to take a look and give opinions can help you see exactly where something’s off. It allows you to take all the effort into just “learning” and focus it into an area of weakness. Filling that weakness will then open up new areas of improvement.
Sometimes, we’re a bit generous with ourselves. By that I mean, we don’t really see the weaknesses that are actually there. Letting someone else take a look and reframe our perspective gives us instant room to adjust. In turn, that can help boost our improvement dramatically, helping us push over the learning curve.
Problem Solving & Implementation
Depending on the industry, feedback can be a tricky thing. If a piano teacher informs you that you’re playing the wrong notes, then all there is to be done is play the correct notes. However in areas like storytelling or songwriting, things are a bit harder. In any area where you are expressing yourself, outside feedback is useful to try figure out where YOU should adjust, not asking for other people to make that adjustments for you.
One of my favorite quotes about writing and feedback is from novelist Neil Gaiman, who famously said:
“When people tell you something’s wrong or that it doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
~ Niel Gaiman
This could be because of a bunch of different reasons. Perhaps they’re not well enough versed in the industry to give you solutions. But if you’re looking to learn, its more important to uncover issues, and try different solutions for yourself — to learn problem solving. Maybe the pacing of the story is a little slow, and that’s making the characters feel a bit flat in turn, since nothing is really happening. The feedback might take issue with the characters, but nothing is actually wrong with the characters. That’s a symptom of the actual issue.
Leaning how to take feedback of a problem and troubleshoot solutions for yourself is another tool I’ve often used. It allows me to focus on fixing something for myself, which is a much harder lesson to forget than if someone just told you x + b = y.
I hope you found this post interesting and maybe you’ll be able to steal bits of it to adapt in your own workflow. I like these three things because it allows me to take the energy spent on just “learning” and channel it into “learning intentionally.”
If you have any tips on how to streamline the learning process or get a boost over the curve, leave a comment!
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