One and Done
The First Skill to Cultivate
I have returned from Tennessee with a mild sunburn and about fifty pounds of hand-picked strawberries to show for it. Those two things are related.
A highlight of my visit with my folks was meeting their current foster dog, Cocoa. He is an eight-year-old Chihuahua/Treeing Tennessee Brindle mix, or at least that’s what the lady at the rescue says. He looks like a good old-fashioned Tennessee Tile Vacuum to me (closely related to the Southern California Crumbhound, which Maxine is). A good dog who leaves no crumb on the floor for you to clean up. I spent the trip cajoling my partner back in Maryland to let me adopt this dog and bring him home but Joy put his foot down.
My dad told me not to feel sad about it because Cocoa is too old to learn new tricks anyway, but this is emphatically not true. Our fifteen-year-old husky, Laila, recently learned a new trick of finishing her whole bowl of food all in one go instead of grazing from it all day. We taught her this new trick by pretending to give the bowl of food to Maxine while saying very loudly to one another “oh no, Maxine is eating Laila’s dinner!” The point of this story is that even a very old dog can learn a new trick. This is relevant to today’s topic. I know you don’t come here for the dog anecdotes. This isn’t Pet Life.
Not that I couldn’t write you a whole biweekly update about my pets’ antics, I could, but that’s not what this is.
Cocoa has the one and only one skill you really need to be successful at anything; so does Laila, and even Maxine, and my dad, and your dad, and you, and me. Everybody has some affinity for, and some level of proficiency already in, this skill—and all anybody need do to move toward success in any endeavor is to train this one skill. It is, in itself, the skill of learning new things.
I’m not calling you an old dog, by the way, just because I’m saying you can learn new tricks. You could be and probably are a very young and attractive dog. Maybe you are not a dog at all.
A lot of people are resistant to learning new things, or to learning new ways of doing things they already know how to do. Most people don’t love a change to something with which they’re comfortable and familiar. This is human nature. If something is uncomfortable, or unjust toward us, then yes obviously we welcome change and want to alter that status quo. But when things are comfy and working fine? Most people do not want to see a change in how things are right now, if right now is “alright,” even if a change could make things better than “alright.”
Pattern recognition means we match up information as our senses take it in with information already stored in our brain. When something is familiar to us, we recognize its patterns because we’ve seen them before and we remember them.
For instance, I recognize all the patterns of my car because I’ve had it for a while, and I’ve had this same brand of car (Toyota) for even longer. I know what all the sounds and lights mean. I know where all the switches and knobs are. If I jump behind the wheel of a Ford, I’m out of my comfort zone. I don’t instinctively know what a dinging sound is trying to tell me. If I need to turn on the hazards, I might have to search for them.
Pattern recognition enables people to do inductive thinking, meaning when we see a pattern we’ve seen before, we can predict what will happen based on what has happened before, in our experience, when we’ve seen the same pattern. This was really important for our ancestors. Pattern recognition helps us quickly recognize when something is amiss or out of place. It’s what lets you spot a predator lurking in a familiar environment or identify which mushroom is provender and which is poison.
The fact that humans have stuck around for hundreds of thousands of years and become the dominant animal life form on our planet suggest that we have been really freaking successful at pattern recognition and inductive thinking. But all that long-winded explanation is to say, the primitive lizard brain at the core of your well-developed modern human brain is predisposed to preferring a familiar setting if that setting is not actively dangerous or miserable for you (sometimes even if it is miserable). Familiarity means your brain can recognize threats most efficiently. This is why people stay in suboptimal situations even when better opportunities are right there. It’s comfortable and familiar.
Likewise, learning new stuff can be uncomfortable. When you begin to learn a new thing, you’re going to be bad at it for a while before you become good at it. When you’re learning a new creative process, your early outputs almost certainly will not be masterpieces. Something probably inspired you to begin this new creative endeavor, for instance:
Your friend knitted a cool sweater and you want to knit one, too
You heard a beautiful song played on a piano and it motivates you to learn the piano
You read a story that impressed you, and you would like to write your own
Chances are, your first effort is not going to come out at a comparable level of quality to whatever it was that inspired you to learn the new skill. Your first sweater might not be wearable. Your first manuscript might not be publishable. Spending time and effort to produce a result that doesn’t live up to your expectation is discouraging and a lot of people give up learning something new when they realize they weren’t like automatically born good at it. A lot of people give up before they even finish. First few paragraphs didn’t come out easy and perfect? Quit. You sat down at the piano for the first time with some sheet music in front of you and you couldn’t bang out “The Entertainer”? Give up.
Many are the unfinished sweaters still on the needle, abandoned three rows in.
But if you can master the skill of persevering at learning a new skill—of pushing through the uncomfortable early phase filled with frustration and unsatisfactory results—then you can go on to become skilled at anything else. Knitting, writing, and playing the piano are three very different skills that produce three very different outputs but if you look at them as creative processes rather than means to different end products they have a lot of commonalities.
For instance, each has a low bar to entry: Anyone can begin splashing words on paper if they know words and how to write them; anyone can begin banging away on a piano keyboard and cause sounds to happen; and anyone can start knitting a sloppy potholder with two sticks, a string, and five minutes of instruction from a YouTube video.
But each of these skills has so much depth that one can improve steadily at them over a lifetime and never run out of improvements to make. There’s almost always a harder garment you could knit, and if you’ve reached the maximum difficulty in the pattern you can always move up to a harder-to-use fiber or apply a more challenging design to the same old pattern. You can never reach a point in writing or in playing the piano where there’s no room left to improve.
And each of these skills is improved not by sitting around strategizing and thinking about how you might do them better in the future but by using the skill and practicing it. As far as I know, skills can only be improved two ways: Study and practice. Further, there’s also only one way to ensure you will never improve at or master a skill: Quitting. Ergo, if you do study and practice and you don’t quit, you will improve the skill.
Even if you never progress beyond knitting simple scarves, if you keep knitting them you will eventually become excellent at knitting a simple scarf—you won’t be able to help it. You’ll become faster and more efficient with experience and your finished scarves will become better over time, with more uniform stitch tension and fewer mistakes. Even if you only ever attempt to play “Chopsticks,” you’ll eventually become very good at playing “Chopsticks.” You might even branch out into “Heart and Soul.”
How do you develop the skill of learning new skills? How do you actively cultivate it?
Give yourself enthusiastic and whole-hearted permission to be bad, first of all. Allow yourself to produce bad work. Actually, no—actively pursue the production of bad end products. Just do whatever the skill is badly, and sloppily, and a lot. “Quantity” is not a different and separate approach to “quality.” Quality proceeds from quantity. Embrace your beginner badness. Remind yourself that the ideal end result of your early attempts is learning; if you produce a creative work in the attempt, that’s great! If the quality of that creative work doesn’t meet your standard, it is not a failure. The actual product was the learning experience. The creative work that came out of that is the byproduct.
Don’t waste a lot of time trying for a perfect first attempt. Make your first attempt, and your second, third, fourth, sixth, tenth, and so on, in rapid succession, in the time it would have taken you to make that first attempt perfect. Review this spate of first attempts and establish a baseline—your baseline. Do not set a benchmark based on the work of those you admire and want to emulate and try to establish the gap between where you are and where they are. Instead, establish your own baseline and try to improve on it every time you sit down to do whatever it is you do.
I will sign off following one more, somewhat-related thought. One of my hobbies other than doing this is making clothes and accessories. Oftentimes I will post a photo of something I have made, like a dress or a purse, on social media to show my friends and someone will say, “Wow, that’s so good! You could sell those!” I appreciate the sentiment, which is that my work is indistinguishable from something that has been professionally made, but remember: The benchmark of something’s value doesn’t have to mean “money could be exchanged for this.” Things have value in many other ways. You can just reject the idea that endeavors are only as valuable as the income streams they produce or might produce. No one can stop you.
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