Lately, I've been thinking about being a beginner.
There's immense value in trying out new things, extending from a personal to a cosmic scale. If no one began anything then nothing would happen, except all those old things (blegh). No matter what it is, whether a simple new hobby, an endeavour of self-improvement or a Herculean task of great import, going through the process has value in-and-of itself and is the only consistent route to truly great things. So! We should keep doing it!
---- Begin long-winded rant on the value of trying new things in relation to fulfillment ----
There's no "right way to live", as far as I've seen. Even theistic religions keep to some core tenets and give a lot of room for maneuvering. There've gotta be better ways to live, though. There are big questions that we'll never answer or tricky bits of morality that we're still figuring out, but aside from these we know some things that are just better, especially at a personal scale.
"To each their own" we say, with unspoken disclaimers for all sorts of terrible things like drug abuse, murder and tail-gating. We say this because we believe we all deserve some measure of unassailable autonomy as a basic human right and we shouldn't tell each other what to do. But why not? Well, because if I want to do XYZ then who the frick are you to tell me otherwise? Which is really to say "we're generally too prideful and dishonest with ourselves to handle constructive criticism".
The practical side of this is we just don't want to be bothered with the criticism. Change is hard, so leave me alone. This can be a useful defense mechanism against feeling bad about yourself all the time, a common pitfall of opening yourself up to uncomfortable truths and honest self-reflection. BUT, we need to move past it, because:
we all have an inner "core self" and seeking a pure expression of that self is a good thing to do
Everyone would just be happier/healthier if they did this actively, however intensely. The problem is that we're a bit "all or nothing" and have a tendency to frame acknowledging a possible improvement as also acknowledging a failure. This is a big hurdle to get over. Being genuinely happy and comfortable while working hard towards a goal. Not feeling bad when you acknowledge you have room to improve. Improving towards some perfect ideal of your "self", while not thinking you're a piece of shit.
This is hard, but it's worth it and it's why we should constantly try new things.
---- End long-winded rant ----
The tough part is, beginning new things is hard! Beginning something new feels like we're stumbling around half blind in uncharted territories, unsure of exactly where we're going, while having a ghost following you and whispering "you fucking suck". We start with some vague notion, some initial impetus or goal, but it can quickly get lost and that ghost can quickly get to us.
Beginning something involves learning in a very specific context, often with a very specific goal. Learning requires simultaneously dealing with the subject matter itself, your own internal state and any number of external factors that could throw wrenches into your gears.
![[contexts of learning.excalidraw]]
Generally, we think mostly about (1), because it's the "thing", but I think it's helpful to push towards a broader perspective sometimes and look at how all three relate. As a meta-skill*, improving this process will improve every other aspect of your life.
- *meta-skills = skills related to skills, like learning how to learn
We should be extremely concerned with what it's like to be new at something. There's so much to keep track of and we miss a lot of things as beginners. This is mostly fine! The process will never be perfect and any progress we make is amazing. We want to avoid, however, that catastrophic failure of quitting for the wrong reasons. We need people to do new things for the betterment of the world, whether projects that affect large communities or simply for their own personal growth. Quitting for the wrong reasons is such a shame because it's not a true failure. It's a failure of execution, a premature failure and it's a lie.
The goal of this is to highlight some consistent phenomenon and pitfalls that we experience as beginners as well as some strategies to help deal with them.
- a big idea here is things that are "simple, but difficult" and "knowing what vs knowing how". You could think of all sorts of things that are really easy to say and conceptualize and theoretically do, but quite hard to consistently execute on. Things like not eating junk food, listening more attentively or being less prideful.
Our mindstate while starting out in something is an anchoring and driving force for us. There are a wide range of emotions that have subtle, yet powerful effects. Often, these emotions are very natural, but very unhelpful and so we should be aware of when a feeling is destructive rather than constructive.
- big idea = the "truth" of any idea or emotion is often less important than what it gives you. Is it informative or does it just cause you to beat yourself up?
Here are four concepts that commonly elicit troublesome emotions while beginning something:
- progress and expectations
- talent
- failure
- emotional intent
The internet has given us incredible visibility for all sorts of different things. You want to get into competitive bread-baking? Less than 10 clicks and you're on your way. Want to learn how to grow nostalgic 90s cartoon character bonzais? Say less.
The driver of this visibility is the attention economy and it's incentivized to encourage passive content consumption to justify advertising. This means that as a default state anyone "plugged in" to the internet is very actively nudged towards not doing things. Generally, we're watching more and doing less.
Human's have a tendency* to only highlight successes or final outcomes and this combines with the above to give us a skewed perspective of progressing in something. Our internal model of things has far too much polished output and not enough rough drafts, trial and error, edits and overall struggle.
- *give me a pass with how broad-sweeping this is
This preamble, aside from exposing my general wariness of the current state of internet technology, is hinting at an important challenge that beginners have to face.
To start:
- we see lots of amazing things
- what we see often ignores the hard work involved in creating high-quality things
- as a habit, we watch more than we do, developing taste, but not skill
Which leads to:
- a feeling that we should be good very quickly
- a huge gap between our taste/expectations of something and our actual ability to do that thing
The average person has probably watched so many movies and TV shows that if they set out to create one, they'd be expecting Spielberg-calibre output right away. It would even be difficult to make a show as mediocre as Friends (sorry Friends h8ers, you actually can't do better :O). This expectation is ridiculous and can kill our confidence before we even have an opportunity to build it up!
This imperfect mental model of quality makes you think that things should just "happen". Seeing the crisp final product and judging it against whatever your first draft looks like. Thinking that there's ever a moment where you just sit down and it "clicks" or you get touched by the muse, go into a drunk-on-creativity stupor where you wake up next to 12 naked strangers and a complete draft of The Great American novel. It's a much slower process than this; all iterations and prolonged effort.
This concept is further illustrated by "ah hah! moments" and the "slow hunch". An "ah hah! moment" in research is when someone finally figures out a problem they've been working on for awhile. From the outside it might look like they're just a genius and were struck by lightning, but the reality is it was a "slow hunch". That one moment was the result of hours, days or maybe even years of toying with that problem. They attacked it from every angle, tried all sorts of different things and failed countless times until one day they were drinking coffee and the idea hit them. Without that work, the idea wouldn't have even given them a second glance. It would've swiped left at just another profile with the lame template of selfy, fun pic, dressy pic and friends pic.
You need to endure past initial doubts because they aren't useful. They don't inform you, they only deter you from putting in the work required to actually become good at something. Good things take time. Learning things take time. The effort brings the outcome. Focus on the effort.
Very similar to the above idea of "unrealistic expectations about progress and outcomes", here's another stifling phenomenon: we feel, to various intensitites, that we need to have natural talent to do something.
Let's look at the age-old middleschool motivational gym-shirt quote:
[[hard work beats talent everytime]]
I love this quote as an example of a saying that has its heart in the right place, but is just hilariously false when taken literally. I have worked hard at things and been crushed by talent and I have easily beaten people at things when they're working harder than I am.
It might be false when looking at it strictly, but that's not the point; it's a guidepost! It's a helpful lie that serves a purpose. It knows it's not true, but it's trying to get us to forget about talent and just focus on the work.
Talent can make things easier as a beginner and it can differentiate people at the highest level, but in both cases hard work is still required.
It obviously feels great when you're good at something right away: a bunch of people around you try it and you can kinda see what they're doing wrong, have an inkling of what to do better, then you try it and everyone looks at you all impressed. This is a pretty fleeting state and you will fall off if you don't keep working hard. You won't get to the level for the talent to even be relevant.
The other reason that "jeeeze, hard work >>>" is that natural talent can be revealed at late stages of your progress. You can only discover this talent if you get to that late stage! Also, if you end up not having any talent, it just feels great when you get good at something you sucked at initially. This should be the thing we highlight and celebrate.
If you're deterred, as Saliari was by Mozart, that you don't have natural talent, then use him as a warning! The "middle-ground" of something still produces tons of useful output and is accessible to anyone through hard work. We need this middle-ground to iterate and experiment. It's only through this collective effort that we can improve. Maybe your efforts will inspire a future generation!
An aside: I'd argue, maybe further some other time, that we have some instinct to focus too much on individuals when we tell stories and that this has affected our view of progress throughout history. Maybe it's a coping mechanism to keep ourselves motivated. We think too much that success stories are the result of one peron's brilliance or their sheer determination. We too often scrub away all of the supporting roles or work that had come before them. We want greatness to just be individual, because then we could achieve it ourselves. I think the reality is that most of the time standout individuals, while talented and hard-working, are expressions of broader human effort.
So far we talked about:
- having reasonable expectations about progress
- valuing hard work more than talent
These hint at the sort of resilience required to learn something. It's not necessarily about having the confidence that you'll succeed, but more about ignoring your levels of confidence and just carrying forward all the same. In any progression, regardless of your talent, you will fail at some point. It might not be a big failure, but it will happen.
Easier said than done, we need to have a positive relationship with failure. We need to conceptualize failure as an opportunity for growth. With this in mind, we can happily fail often, learning each time so that we can eventually succeed. It gives us room to experiment.
We want to run the marathon of progress, not the sprint of motivation or pride. Failure is not an end-state, it's part of the process.
The last concept related to our perspectives is "emotional intent".
Can you imagine how you feel when you're truly inspired to start something? The moment, maybe catalyzed by a movie, a podcast, or a book, where feel it. The impulse to do that thing or reach that new state.
Conversely, can you imagine the moment when the above feeling leaves you? Where that strong feeling dissipates and you stop whatever that new thing was, if you started it at all? I've had many of these moments, but I actually can't remember any specifically. I think it's because while the inspiration is usually a discrete event, the failure silently fades. It could be overnight or over the course of a week, but there's not any one moment.
My oldest memory of this idea is from a "Kids Can Free the Children" presentation I saw in highschool. It was a big assembly and was mostly shock-and-awe about child soldiers in Africa. People cried as we were asked to shut our eyes and visualize a story, culminating in the question, "short sleeves, or long?". A lot of people were quite shook up and ready to help. I'm pretty sure I had already applied for my malaria shot by the time we left the hall. Just outside, I met an older guy I knew through a friend. He had watched the presentation earlier and came up to me, almost enraged,
"This bullshit is so fucking stupid. Scaring everyone and making them feel bad for no reason. We're all going to forget about this in a day."
And we did. While this guy was generally an asshole and overly cynical, he was correct in this moment. It was an example of a strong, but short-lived emotional intent.
When it comes to emotional intent, I've succeeded in acting on some of these moments, surely, but not others. So what's the difference?
Our emotional intent in moments of inspiration is often too focused on outcomes, not the process required to get there. We picture ourselves in end-states and put tons of emotional weight into these outcomes. This has a [[sedative effect]] of sorts where we actually feel good just by the having the thoughts. We visualize it so thoroughly it's almost as if we've experienced it. While doing so, we also neglect to visualize the process required to get to that outcome. So, we leave the moment a little bit sated and with a false impression of what it's going to be like to achieve our vision. All further thoughts about the vision share this and slowly dilute our desire to do it. Then, when we finally sit down to DO THE THING, we're easily deterred by the actual effort and monotony involved.
One way to help with this is to build a habit of not over-indulging when visualizing outcomes. It is useful to give yourself that motivation, but it's very easy to go too far and sedate yourself.
Another is building a habit of visualizing the effort. Think about the exact process required to achieve any goal. Think about yourself sitting down and not wanting to do something, but doing it anyways. Use the motivation and inspiration you feel in any given moment to lay down a plan for how you're going to get things done. You should continue to do this visualization actively through any endeavour.
Once you stop basically climaxing to the mere thought of an accomplishment, you'll avoid the post-coital trough of motivation and be able to chase it.
Once you have a proper image of the effort and steps required to get somewhere, you'll be better able to keep working when actually faced with that effort.
All of the above concepts related to mental state are great reasons why you should encourage people.
We're so fragile in those early stages, for so many understandable reasons. We don't always like telling people we're doing something new or we do so in a bashful way. We try things for a short time and then stop because some part of ourselves tells us we're no good. This is such a common and widely applicable cadence that we really ought to deal with it. Unnecesssarily limiting yourself is a sad state to have entered, so, in short,
encourage yourself and others, always
To give a disclaimer to soften this catch-all rule:
encourage yourself and others, always, unless someone is getting hurt
NOTE: see how much worse the second sounds? It's so much easier to internalize the first one. Yeah! Sure! Encourage everyone, always! It sits in your mind like this bastion of clarity. As soon as you add this extra condition, it gets so muddy. - NOTE^2^: I think this difference in resonance has huge impacts on what we care about. We encounter bad ideas that feel good and good ideas that feel meh, internalizing both.
Let's take few common cases:
- starting a workout program
- starting a new eating habit
- getting up earlier in the day
These are broadly all self-improvement endeavours and are very accessible to the average person, so I feel as if I've experienced and seen them countless times. Just imagine that moment telling someone about or being told about someone doing the above. You will certainly hear a lot of "oh nice, good for you" type comments cuz it's not that hard to be ostensibly happy for someone. Often times, though, someone's internal judgement seeps out, whether in subtle ways like their facial expression or in bitch-ass ways like "yeah I guess that's good for you. I'd do it too if not for...". These critical self-reflections are hard to avoid, but it's really important and helpful if you can. Whatever it is, it's not about you! Be happy for them. Like actual Gatorade, drinking too much Hatorade is bad for your health.
The complex factors of a relationship come into play with this. Are you peers? Generally, are you competitive with this person? Are you doing something similar also? It's really easy to be happy for someone who just lost a lot of weight when you're already fit. It's a lot harder when you're struggling to do so.
Simple, but difficult. Dealing with this requires putting aside various [[reactions based on ego]], like pride and insecurity. It's hard, especially in a competitive environment, to see someone do something well and be genuinely happy for them if you're not also doing that thing well.
We frame things relative to our own state very reflexively and the external world is a mirror for the internal. Seeing success or change puts our attention on our own state, naturally focusing on failures and shortcomings. I know of no shortcut around this, but I think we can redirect this instinct a productive way. Ideally we could acknowledge a positive trait of someone and either entirely ignore our own related traits, or calmly reflect and kindly (to ourselves and them) note some potential changes to be made.
Here are three sorts of "states" when I think about encouraging someone to do something, and rules of thumb for each:
- you've accomplished that thing already -> it's easy to forget what it's like to be a beginner or how easy it was for you. Have sympathy. Don't degrade or gatekeep.
- you're pursuing that thing now -> if you're competitive, you might be threatened by their progress. Be competitive, but realize that if they get better, so will you! Frame your competition as a constant effort at improving together, not just beating them.
- you are completely detached from that thing -> avoid the pitfalls of "defensively dragging someone down", whereby their change makes you defensive and you discourage them! Be positive. Their journey is not your journey.
Meditation, journalling and speaking positively (no backhanded disclaimers) about other peoples' success are three ways to practice this redirection.
However we get there, this kind of internal and external encouragement is extremely important. Whatever someone is trying, it's a true shame if they stop. It's even more so if the reason they stop is something as unnecessary as lack of encouragement or the presence of outward discouragement.
So far, it's been mostly descriptions of some instincts that I think we have and how they play out in the normal course of things. To get more prescriptive, I think the best way to deal with them is by curating our environments and setting up processes to work within.
Generally, this is encompassed by the idea that
mechanisms > best intentions
It's easy to lose your way once you've begun something and a vast array of forces aligned against you. We've gotta cut through the noise of distractions and stress from work, friends, family or random assholes who tell you to get your bike off their property even though it's locked to a public sign at the very edge of their lawn. To do this, it's a stronger point of leverage to put systems in place to help you, rather than rely on things like willpower or memory.
- big idea = leverage! Work smart,
notand hard
However subtle, your environment will always have an effect on you. There are so many possible factors to think about and while we can get by while ignoring them, it certainly helps to be aware of:
- enabling factors, like having a quiet place to work or having healthy snacks in your house for when you're hungry
- disabling factors, like notifications on a device that will distract you or lacking a tool you need to be more efficient
- physiological factors, like the amount and direction of light affecting your focus or ceiling height affecting how you think (the cathedral effect)
- psychological factors, like external stresses nagging at you or seeing other people trying to do the same thing
All of these many-and-varied factors play a role in how we perform over time in any given environment. They are a very strong point of leverage for us to improve that performance. Generally (you might say "duuuh"):
- make anything you're trying to do easier
- make anything you're trying not to do harder
Here's a short list of ways that we can manage our environments to do this:
- join a community that will enable you (e.g. a sports team, group fitness classes, an online community)
- get the much-touted combination of:
- a coach
- a peer
- someone you can help
- have a dedicated workspace that removes distractions
- step away from your screens to do focused work
- create prompts to do good things (e.g. notifications, a streaking checklist)
- create easily accessible contexts that put you in the right headspace (e.g. grouping browser tabs, notes that explain what you should be doing during any given task)
- have a timed structure for how you're going to work, allowing you to take an appropriate amount of breaks
While your environment affects you while you're doing something, a plan is master control of everything you're doing related to some endeavour. Regardless of how simple, you should make plans!
Having a plan gives access to a few things that help continue making progress:
- a tangible view of progress, so we can feel accomplishment
- the ability to review what we've done and course-correct as needed
- something objective and external to compare our activities against
A couple useful types of plans that are specialized:
- a backup plan
- a plateau plan
You need a backup plan because you're going to fail. The goal is to fail better and not to have the failures be that disruptive. What's your plan for when you miss a practice session? For when you wake up late one day?
You need a plateau plan because you'll get to a point where you don't see as much progress as before and you'll be discouraged.
Having a plan in advance ensures that we're sowing seeds for our futures selves. It's so much harder to make a plan during or after, so do it before.
We miss a lot of things as beginners and learn so much through trial and error. Trying new things is important for ourselves and the collective good of all humanity. Learning to learn might be the single greatest [[meta-cognitive skill]] that we possess.
Baseless overconfidence is dangerous because you might end up thinking you will succeed at anything, which can be quite brittle when things don't go your way. It's a slippery slope to feeling entitled to an outcome or thinking that it should come quickly. A more measured confidence is important, though, because you can succeed at anything, it just might take longer or require getting creative with your effort.
To help with this, it's important to understand that good things take time and there's no reason to be good at something right away.
Talent shouldn't deter you in anything, only encourage and inspire you.
Failures are opportunities for growth, while trying again in the face of failure is another truly great meta-skill.
The process of learning is guided by your emotional intent, which should be focused on the hard work involved in a process, not the outcome.
To help yourself and others with the genuinely difficult and vulnerable task of learning, you should encourage everyone by default.
We can help with all of this by curating our environments to work for us and using plans to guide the entire process.
Rules are the greatest example of two important "human things" (like, so human):
- hypocrisy
- trying to simplify things into extremely obvious shorthands that help cope with the uncertainty, complexity and chaos of life
Embodying these two points are some common phrases:
- the letter or the spirit of a law
- do as I say, not as I do
- master the rules before you break them
People might say "follow the letter of the law" or "it was the spirit of the law, not the letter" when discussing how we deal with laws. These highlight that we're quite aware of two different aspects of a law:
- what it actually says, in a strict sense
- what it means to say, or what it was trying to do
Dealing this this difference in anything is hard. Dealing with this difference in society is reeeealllly hard. The legal system exists to enforce laws, yes, but also in large part just to bridge the gap between these two things. We know that no preset rules could ever account for all the nuance of life and the different circumstances that might pop up.
In society, laws are the best we can do to make infinitely complex situations manageable. This same idea applies to all rules that are prescriptions for actions, whether legal, moral or tenets of a craft.
Often from a parent or authority figure, we've heard "do as I say, not as I do". We usually hear it first while growing up and our parents are a likely the first source from which we learn about hypocrisy. I used to think about this interaction as a very unjust double standard. It was always small things, like eating food, doing chores. I think people are so prone to reacting to hypocrisy that we have a predictable bias of "perceiving hypocrisy" when it's not actually there. It can instantly invalidate a person, an organization, a movement or an entire country. In the truest sense a "double standard" is unjust, but our over-sensitivity to hypocrisy will blind us to whether a standard is actually unfair. We look at rules often as double standards that don't treat us equally and we bristle against them. The problem is that a standard is only actually "double" if both parties are exactly the same. Most often, we think something is a double standard because we don't properly understand the nuance of both sides. Maybe there's a difference we're missing? Similarly, we think someone telling us a rule, then not following the rule is hypocritical. It's only hypocritical if they also declare their intent to follow the rule. What we're missing here is:
- the purpose of giving beginners rules
For beginners, rules are guide posts, not guard rails, designed to convey the best path forward to a learner. They're supposed to help you navigate the muddy uncharted waters of the thing you're learning.
So, we shouldn't be upset when a rule we follow fails us. We weren't lied to. Our teacher is not a hypocrit. Those failures probably represent the nuance that we weren't ready to hear about yet or that we needed to experience first hand. Rules will fail. They won't always work. That's the rule, not the exception.
The final saying "master the rules before you break them" is a prescription for this! Most rules are, by design, supposed to be broken at some point. What point is that? When you've learned enough about something that you can properly understand "the spirit of the law" and make an informed decision about heading off the beaten-trail and into the unknown. We don't want to get lost before we know where we are. Without the experience and contextual understanding of mastery, we could easily get lost, disorienting or worst of all hurt. Real mastery isn't knowing all the rules, it's knowing the landscape so well that you can you know which rules to follow, which to bend and which to break.
- TODO: flesh out guidepost/landscape/map idea
Rules are helpful guideposts, but they still shouldn't be followed too closely. Don't get hurt, but don't stifle creativity or fun. The ultimate goal is progressing. Progessing requires that you continue, so do whatever it takes to continue.
Simplifying things into basic rules is really easy and extremely appealing. If you consider some prescriptive idioms "rules for life", we can see how this works. It's a lot easier to say "always do XYZ" instead of "do XYZ, except when ABC or if D, you should add W. Then again, it's also nice sometimes to try EFG". It can be overhwleming, daunting or far too much for a beginner to process.
