Getting back on the wagon

I'll spare you the excuses, compelling reasons and dire necessities that forcibly kept me from my computer screen for a week now.

The interesting bit - for both of us - is what happens next? Do I get back on the wagon, or do I sit in the middle of the road sobbing while it disappears into the sunset?

Whenever we fail to live up to our own intentions and expectations we face the climb back onto the wagon. It's easy getting on the first time, full of hope and good intentions, full of excitement about where we're headed and how much greener the grass will be when we get there. It's harder the second, third and fourth time, with the knowledge of failure (or defeat) burning in our breast, and grass that is an ubiquitous shade. But unless we climb back on the wagon, we won't get to our intended destination.

I wonder why it seems easier to say, 'Sod the wagon, I never wanted to be on it anyway!' than it it is to accept that we fell off - or jumped off - but now we want back on again?

Where did it all go wrong?

How hard is it to keep on track with any plan? Pretty hard: take weight-loss for example! We plan our work, and work our plan. When it goes wrong (as it too often does) we're left feeling foolish and inadequate. We seldom stop and do enough analysis. Which is a shame. Usually we were a bit half-arsed in one area or another.

Do you (secretly) prefer planning to doing?

Do you hesitate to start until the plan is a thing of such perfect beauty that actually doing it might prove a bit of a let down? If your visualisation is good enough, chances are you've experienced the gratification already, and you're ready to move on to your next plan...

Do you (secretly) prefer doing to planning?

Do you get twitchy with wasting time navel gazing, all the thinking and talking? Do want to jump right in and get some action going? After all, half the issues that come up won't emerge from even the best planning, so get started already and make it work, right? What? Will your actions all contribute to the desired outcome? Maybe you kind of lost track of what the doing was all about anyway, you're all about the journey, not the outcome.

Or you could be like me, and shift between the two, depending on your mood or the task at hand. Both my best work, and my worst, have occurred when I did a bit of both! Working out what was different in my successes and my failures made life a lot easier.

Some examples from music teaching:

The planners keep practice diaries, and record the homework assignments religiously, and can tell you exactly what time of which days they have set aside to do them. They have a rewards system for each successfully completed practice session, culminating in a largish reward when a certain point is reached, eg. a new piece is complete. Sometimes they're so busy designing the process, they might, it's a bit embarrassing really, they might not quite get around to actually doing every practice session, especially if something else in their life throws out their rigorous schedule.

If I don't head them off at the pass, they eventually decide: Maybe I'm not talented enough to learn music, this is really hard, so I can't be any good. Or maybe it's just not the right time, it might be better to wait until I have more leisure so I can really focus on music...

Or, they decide to do more than was asked of them (more is always better, right?) and end up exhausted and distraught and their lack of achievement - they only achieved 50% more than I asked of them, after putting in about 150% more than I wanted.

If I don't head them off at the pass, they eventually decide: Maybe I'm not talented enough to learn music, this is really hard, so I can't be any good. Or maybe it's just not the right time, it might be better to wait until I have more leisure so I can really focus on music...

The doers get home and sit down at the piano and play for at least as long as I recommended. Or longer. They have a whale of a time, learning by doing, exploring a bit of this and a bit of that. Except they don't always remember to do the homework that was assigned. Or all of the homework assigned. They didn't really see the point. Or they did extra homework on two days, to make up for not doing homework on the other five, because hey, it's the same amount of time, except that they don't seem to have made as much progress as they thought.

If I don't head them off at the pass, they eventually decide: Maybe I'm not talented enough to learn music, this is really hard, so I can't be any good. Or maybe it's just not the right time, it might be better to wait until I have more leisure so I can really focus on music...

Other doers go home and do the homework assigned, then get stuck into another piece that looks interesting and they're sure they can work out on their own. Something not-too-hard looking like, oh, the full version of Scott Joplin's The Entertainer. It's just chords, right? They spend extra time (more is always better, right?) and end up exhausted and distraught and their lack of achievement - they spent hours and they've only got the first few measures happening - and after 10 half hour lessons too!

If I don't head them off at the pass, they eventually decide: Maybe I'm not talented enough to learn music, this is really hard, so I can't be any good. Or maybe it's just not the right time, it might be better to wait until I have more leisure so I can really focus on music...

Our society has a pervasive myth that learning music is hard, and requires talent. This primes most of us to failure at the get-go. Learning to play the piano takes about as much intelligence and hand-eye coordination as driving a car. (Learning to play the piano well enough to make a career out of it is a lot harder, and so is being a professional racing car driver.)

This pervasive myth means that many people give up their musical journey before they have to, rather than seeing that they are applying too much or too little energy and persistence to their plan of action. Or too little much or too little thought and attention to their plan of action.

And that's where it all went wrong.

This is post 73 of 100 posts in 100 days.

to fail is a verb, not a noun

Carol Dweck has written a fascinating book, Mindset. She's the lady who found that praising kids for their intelligence made them perform worse on tests than those praised for their effort.

In one study, kids were given 3 tests. The first one was easy. The second one was very hard, so most kids failed. The third test was medium hard, so the kids should have done better again. But many didn't.

All kids who did well on the first test were praised. Praise along the lines of "you did well - you must be very smart" encouraged what Dweck calls "the fixed mindset", an either/or view of the world. When the second test 'proved' to these kids that they weren't so smart after all, either they lived down to that belief or they stopped trying. The kids who were praised for their effort "you did well - you must have tried really hard", perservered on all tests, and weren't worried by getting lower marks on the second, because they recognised it was a harder test.

Belief in innate ability (in this case, intelligence) robbed the kids of resilience in the face of failure. Dweck writes compellingly about the pervasive myth - and not just among children - that natural ability means you don't have to work to succeed - and if you don't have natural ability there is no point in trying.

I gather the myth says failure through not trying is better than the humiliation of trying and failing. You can fail a test or a challenge - to fail is a verb. But a fixed mindset encourages a more universal belief: "I failed this, therefore I am a failure." The term doesn't really work well as a noun.

I'm not sure how you can be 'a failure'. What's the definition? Maybe you could fail life, but we'll have to wait until the game is over before we judge, surely? If you're still breathing while you read this, the game is still on.

And if you set out to fail, and succeed at failing? What do we call that? I guess that would be an oxymoron.

This is post 2 of my 100 posts in 100 days challenge.

Oops.

Well, that was my shortest New Year's Resolution ever!  My apologies to you for missing my first deadline.  (I guess the editors of the TLS and the NYT won't be calling after all.)

The best way to overcome a fear of failure is to "fail early and fail well", so they say.  Having missed my first deadline, I have done that, and now have no reason to miss any others throughout the year.

In retrospect, my birthday was not the most auspicious day for writing an article - even a short one! Between the well-wishers, the partying, and the search for a gift for my twin (whose birthday it was too, naturally) I didn't leave enough time.

What I won't do, is say, "Oh look, you've failed.  You mucked it up.  Why did you even begin to think you could do this?"  I don't know about you, but that's the little voice of criticism that whispers in my ear any time I do something new.  I know it's not just me, because many of my students suffer from this nasty little internal voice too.

Whenever we start something new, we face a barrage (well, a trickle, at least) of nay-sayers. We're too old, too young, too busy, to immature, too flighty, too ambitious, too over-confident, too lazy, or too thick to succeed in our new enterprise.  Sometimes the nay-saying is from our nearest and dearest, and is done out of love and concern.  Our loved-ones don't want to see us hurt.  Most of the negative vibes come from inside ourselves.

It can be very liberating to keep going in spite of this.  Take stock of the risks, decide if it is worth it, then try.  I don't like the phrase, "Failure is not an option".  In most of everyday life, that doesn't come up.  Being willing to fail is the only way to get from here to there.

Beyond failure, when it comes to creative endeavours, we have to be willing to be average... or even 'no good'... at something.  Before good art or craft (music, writing, painting, woodwork, you name it) there is always a stage of bad art.  Sometimes that is the highest stage we'll get to.  For myself, I would rather make 'bad' art with joy than no art at all.

So, as we emerge into 2009, my question is, what would you do if you were willing to fail or be "no good" at it?

Let's all get cracking.