The satisfaction of learning a new skill

Today I learned how to do short row shaping in knitting. It's a technique that is easy to do, and hard to explain. I've tried several times in the past. so it's quite exciting - and satisfying - to acquire this skill.

Or any new skill.

When was the last time you learned something new that you weren't forced to learn e.g. for work or legal requirement?

What could you learn tomorrow?

Creativity tools

Everyone is, or can be, creative. It appears to be part of the human condition. Many of us would like to become even more creative. Here's a couple of things that have increased my creativity.

• Teach your non-dominant hand to do something new. If you are very dominant with one hand, this will be difficult, time consuming and frustrating. If you perservere, you will find a host of subtle benefits. Breaking my dominant arm forced this on me, which I don't recommend. Daily writing with your 'off' hand will work in a few weeks, if you do some each day. Which hand do you pick up your coffee cup with? Does it feel odd to use the wrong hand?
• Buy yourself some crayons and a sketch pad. Don't expect to produce 'art', but do enjoy exploring drawing or playing around with the colours. Abstract or photorealistic, the point is how it makes you feel, not what the end result looks like.
• Buy a drum, or use a found object such as a tupperware container, a bucket or a pot. Small Pringles (tm) potato chip containers are particularly nice. Explore the different sound effects you can make. Copy the beat of your favourite rock song - then see if you can improvise your own rhythmic line.

In each activity, your brain will forge or reinforce new neural pathways. When it comes to brains, more connectivity means more creativity.

What creativity tools do you use?

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.

Begin with the end in mind

I recently quoted Stephanie Dowrick who says we judge others on their behaviour, and ourselves on our intentions. Intentions are slippery things. What we intend to do, and the strategy we employ to achieve this end, are often at cross purposes. We humans are wonderfully complex and variable creatures!

We say: "I love my children and being a good father is important to me" then we stay at work late most weeknights until after they are in bed.

We say: "I want to lose a bit of excess weight" then we begin a mortification of the flesh that would impress the early desert fathers, and when we - inevitably - slip up, we give up and eat a whole tub of icecream to drown our failure.

We say: "I want to impress my boss, so I get a raise at my next review" then we hide any mistakes we make, even if this means we'll keep repeating them, because we don't want to look bad. Or we work long, long hours, without checking that our output is achieving what our boss needs.

It's fun pointing out other people's cognitive dissonances. The trick is to find your own. Try this sentence completion:

I want X and to get it I (do) Y.

I want my son to be confident and unselfconscious, and to get it I loudly point out to him times when he is shy, and push him into social situations even when we both know he'll just sulk and refuse to engage in order to resist me.

Ok, that was a cheap shot, but you get the idea.

This is post 15 of 100 posts in 100 days.

Teaching and learning

Today I justified my existence. That's how it feels.

This weekend I've been teaching one of my adult beginners' workshops. Undoing the damage of past musical misery, and unlocking the pianistic talents of those who thought adults can't learn the piano.

Very satisfying, by the way. Fun for me - work - but FUN work.

As always I am amazed at human adaptability. The amazing becomes normal, and then not good enough so quickly.

Total beginners arrive at the Workshop, in many cases unable to read a note of music. By lunchtime on the first day they can find any note on written music and on the keyboard. They're pretty excited. That evening they can play at least one song hands-together, and can vamp some chords. They are frustrated by not being able to do it better.

By the second morning, they are still excited, but disappointed they can't play "better". By lunchtime they're annoyed that they can't instantly play every chord ever written: only a lot of them.

Our inner-critic is a powerful force and it always says: "Is that it?")

But I do love to see perseverence rewarded. I hope that most of the workshop attendees go away feeling that if they apply a sensible strategy they will be able to work things out. "One damn note after another" is virtually never a sensible strategy by the way.

I love meeting and working with people who have decided to "go for it" and achieve their ambition to learn a new skill. That never gets old.

This is post 11 of 100 posts in 100 days

Why slow isn't

Fast.  It's a word that defines the early 21st century.  We want things yesterday.  We want to squeeze more and more into our day, our week, our lives.  We want to be faster at doing things. We want the things we want to arrive quicker.

Other than the slow food movement, there's not much we want to slow down except our Summer Holiday.  Or the treadmill at the gym if we get a bit over-excited.

I sat down recently to plan what I want to achieve with 2009.  I started with looking at what I have achieved over the past 3 years.  I chewed my pencil for a while on that one.  I have achieved a fair bit, in fact, but a lot of it has passed in a blur.

According to Daniel Schachter, in his book The Seven Sins of Memory, one of the reasons we don't remember stuff is we don't notice it in the first place.  Things we haven't noticed don't get stored in our memory. The classic example of this is not remembering where we put down our keys/glasses/wallet.

A lot of my achievements of 2005-2008 turned out to be not-very-memorable.  Which is a shame, because I lose both the joy in doing worthwhile things, and in remembering I have done worthwhile things.  What if the most memorable aspect of 2007 turned out to be that I couldn't remember much about it? I remember a couple of big "chunks" of effort, and the occasional drama, not the daily things that make up most of my year.  I don't remember myself quietly achieving what I set out to do.

We're in love with the heroic. We want to throw a big effort at something - once - and have it sorted thereafter. This explains our ambivalent relationships with dieting, domestic tasks, home renovation, and learning new skills (among other things).  None of these things respond well to a once-and-for-all, speed-based approach.

New skills require frequent practice, and sleep in between.  It's during sleep that our brains "bed down" the new information.  If you are learning something new, have a nap or leave the next bit to the next day and your brain will retain what you've learned better.  It's all part of paying attention in the first place.

Music Logic (tm), the music teaching method I use, says that "Slow is Fast".  It's one of those zen-like sayings that make some people feel impatient. Experience has shown me if I slow down, pay attention, and tackle one thing at a time, and aim to do some work every day, I will make progress.  Progress that's actually 'fast' compared to my other strategy of throwing a large chunk of time at a task, but not thinking much about what I'm doing, then abandoning it in frustration, avoiding it for a day, or three (after all, I just 'wasted' 2 hours on it yesterday and didn't get anywhere much), then chucking a wobbly after a couple of weeks of that, and giving up.  Or just forgetting to ever go back and finish it, because I'm caught up with something else now.

So I vote to slow down (a bit).  When I slow down and notice what is happening while it's happening - rather than chewing my pencil later, or relying on my iPhotos, my iCal and my blog to act as external hard drives. I will achieve my goals.  I might even enjoy the journey.  I will be more aware of my accomplishments.  I will get more satisfaction out of my accomplishments.

And that's why, sometimes slow isn't.

My thanks to John Barton, founder of the Music Logic (tm) method, who introduced me to the concepts 'slow is fast' and 'bite sized pieces'.