The Mental Benefits of Being Terrible at Something
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I've noticed that it's really difficult for me to be bad at something, by which I mean that of my brain hasn't decided that it really needs to keep doing something, I gravitate towards things that I'm already decent at even if I don't really feel like I enjoy it.
Doing even things that I might initially enjoy quickly becomes extremely stressful if I can't observe myself making progress. Forcing things works for a while, but is not sustainable.
Sometimes there's also this weird disconnect between what I want to work on and the things my unconscious brain wants to work on, and that does get stressful as well.
How do I fix this? It seems like a motivation problem, possibly some sort of craving for novelty perhaps (I don't want to say ADHD but sounds like it)?
it has helped me a lot. Plenty of times I don't want to do it, but it's hard to put off for long. You can screw up a lot, and the results are still edible.
Every damn meal I make has problems. Usually it's pretty good, but there are things I can do better with the output and the process. No matter the outcome, I feel better after eating. I'd suggest keeping a small stock of premade stuff on hand. a stack of crackers and some soup. Sometimes I just can't get it together.
Many people simple cannot fathom this. They deny the existing of any such possibility.
And of course, it takes a long time to taste something and realize exactly what it misses or what causes it to taste good, but as long as you are able to test out different recipes you'll eventually end up with quite a few dishes that taste great.
To develop the intuition for flavour and quantities you have to be willing to ruin your food. Add too much salt and you'll find out pretty quick. You'll also learn pretty quickly that the "right" amount is somewhere between too little and too much.
@silvestrov: just try easy recipes and buy good and fresh ingredients, and continue with harder recipes once you get the hang of it.
I've burned soup. I believe you, it can be super hard. There is a feedback loop, you're maybe not seeing it yet. Look at all the things, try lower temperatures, let things take longer.
Experimenting is a later skill. Follow the recipe as well as you can, and observe the outcome. I want to say you'll know where the errors are, but that's not realistic. Maybe your oven is poorly calibrated. Maybe it's too hot for too long. or not hot enough.
The main point is, this is a place you can try and fail, and try again tomorrow. If you don't like the product, figure out why it's bad and fix it. Lots of room to try stuff out, and even if you're vaguely close, you get food. For me, eating changes my mental state. even if the food isn't good, it has this weird effect of ending hunger.
You do you. If cooking is too hard, don't do it. But kinda the point is; try, fail try, fail, try ok, try good. You can figure it out. 7 billion other people did, you can too.
I always fail to remember this when getting frustrated at programmers who don't seem to improve
For example, if you're trying to get better at playing drums, playing the same beat poorly for an hour probably won't do much. A technique like starting to play at a slow tempo and gradually speeding up, cleaning up the mistakes as you go, is a technique that can help you practice more effectively.
The same is true for programming. Implementing a simple TODO app, while a good intro problem to solve for beginners, is probably not going to make most programmers better or more knowledgable at programming.
I don't know if framing it as "natural" is super helpful. I think you're right that some people stumble onto the right feedback loops for some activities. But that doesn't mean that the feedback is unattainable for others. You may have to hunt around, but it's still there. And once you find it, you can make progress on the skill.
My experience is that the most important tool that affects your success at building some skill is being mindful of your narrative around it and how it relates to your identity.
Humans naturally pick and fixate on identities. Once we feel an attribute is true about ourselves, we tend to choose behavior that reinforce that attribute even if it's an identity we don't like. If you define yourself as someone who is incompetent forever at cooking, then you will naturally overlook or avoid actions and input that doesn't confirm that.
You won't cook as often. When you do cook, you won't pay as much attention to the process or results. You won't remember the details of what you did last time (since it was such an unpleasant experience that you shut out the entire memory) and how it differs this time. Without that stuff, there's no way to actually get better.
But if you define yourself as, say, "someone who is not naturally gifted at cooking but wants to learn and is perserverant", you may find it to be a more attainable goal.
Copy an established method from someone else.
Try something random until you run out of ways to mess up.
The latter is extremely time consuming but if you get through the initial hurdles you will have a complete understanding why the "established method" works in the first place.
Frankly I never thought about it before since I self learned cooking quite easily. Maybe it's my French genetics? ;)
I thought cooking was easy, pastry on another hand requires much more dedication and precision, I would say it's the last 20% of cooking.
Smell the spices before you try them out, use small amounts then taste the food while it's cooking. This works for almost anything that isn't baked. Google to find out what spices intensify through cooking (Fenugreek, Cayenne Pepper, etc.)
Also check out The Food Lab's book for information on what different things do, so you can construct a mental model of it.
IMO, cooking is best learned one or two dishes at a time. After some experience, you'll start to get a broader picture of the art. Think of it like trying to learn "music" from scratch by picking up a different instrument each night - it could work eventually, but you're probably make better progress with a little focus.
The feedback is straightforward: If your food sticks, you've messed up. It teaches you loads about the right amount of heat and patience.
Do it ~3 times as the recipe states. sometimes I even do it 3 days in a row.
After that, write it up based on what you learned that you fixed between each attempt. After that, try making some changes. Note - if you're baking don't experiment too much especially as a beginner, but if you're making cinammon rolls you can experiment with the filling much more than the dough, or you can find dozens of different kinds of dough recipes for cinnamon buns.
There is a lot to learn when cooking, but there are a ton of resources online (youtube and otherwise). You need to actively be trying to get better to get better at most things, I've found, unless you're doing it for 8 hours a day at which point you kind of have to become better just by time spent.
You might find that actually, in some things, you don't mind "just playing". But those things are, probably, unlike anything else many others call "play".
I suspect that you do play for its own sake, its just in areas you havent considered in that light.
That said I started attending a pottery-class at local school a couple of years ago. Objectively almost everything I've made has been terrible. And yet? I'm drinking coffee out of a mug I made myself, and that feels pretty good.
It's unusual for me to both recognize that I'm "bad", and yet still want to go back. But definitely true in this case.
It was also extremely satisfying over a few years of off and on spinning to gain the vocabulary to describe why my work was bad. Making 1-2 beautiful (but still flawed) dishes was worth hundreds of mediocre projects.
I struggled so much studying computer science in college just because I was afraid of looking like I didn't know something, instead of realizing that I was supposed to not know these things because I never encountered them before.
I took some biology courses for fun, and easily got the top grades in the class because I had no attachment to the result or subject matter.
Some things I'd rather just enjoy being terrible at. I make bad art badly, for instance, with no self-pressure to even attempt to be good. And no desire to consult a life coach to see if I'm doing "wrong" right. It's cathartic!
I used to have a teacher that would say “Any day I don’t learn anything new, is a day that I died.”
I’ve always been good at picking up new stuff, and understanding difficult concepts, but these days, I have made a conscious decision to do one thing, and do it as well as possible. I’m probably at 90%. I’m fully aware that I’ll never be 100%.
That makes it fun. I like challenges.
This is a skill I've developed, and it's as difficult as anything. I've been taking lessons from masters at things for the last decade and more, and the ability to become a student as an adult is very liberating, even if the freedom has difficult moments.
The professional benefits have also been huge, since being able to bring real confidence to situations where you are not an expert is a significant leadership trait. The confidence comes from knowing your own boundaries and being able to recognize expertise in others and use it instead of trying to emmulate it. You can also recognize skill much faster.
Imagine learning to read music as an adult and asking what the names of the strings are, what the dots on the page mean, why it doesn't resemble this other thing you think you know about, and why your skill in one area doesn't import into this one. The only path forward is work and practice. I'd imagine learning to speak a new language would be similar, where your skill level is beneath that of children.
The key is to do say, "I am going to suck at this until I suck less at it." and then the huge piece is forgiving yourself the natural conceits that your adult mind/ego puts in your way, after recognizing them. To become a student means to accept vulnerability, sometimes humilitation, even shame for the things you do wrong when you realize why you do them, and then deal with them in the psychological present instead of as just being a kid who grows out of it.
You can expect it to take 5-10 years to get as good or better than most of the kids who did something growing up. Having that horizon in mind is useful because it makes the present less urgent. Start it for the challenge, but finish it for the pleasure.
It's been helpful for me to remember that for every expert, there was a time when they were the same level as you are.
But they didn't skip those 5-10 years, they just started 5-10 years earlier. I spent 30 min a day on learning a new language for the last 4 years and I feel like fluency is inevitable, before I started I thought it was impossible throughout my entire childhood.
Are the Big 5 traits something you can actually train on? I've never seen anything to indicate that. I thought they were considered inherent. Would love more info if I have it wrong.
I thought this was a weird conclusion. I think of my self as pretty open to experience (maybe there's a unintuitive definition for this I'm unaware of?) But that is a conclusion I don't really relate to. I guess I'm open to new things but quite so "go with the flow". Seems contradictory out loud but I can't be the only person who feels that way.
Also, I feel like this article seems to suggest mastery is achievable if you just work hard enough. My life experience with my own attempts to master things suggests otherwise. I don't know if everyone has it in them to actual master something.
There is a treatment called exposure therapy [0] which actually is used to threat anxiety and for one helps with emotional processing.
[0] https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/patients-and-families/exp...
Actually doing stuff i am good at stresses me out sometimes! Maybe imposter syndrome or my fear of it actually being Dunning-Krueger :)
That way people don’t typecast you into roles you don’t want to do and typecast you to roles you do want to do.
(This is in the workplace).
Wish I learnt this earlier!