New skills & old

I'm clever. Lots of people say so, and have done all my life; it would be a mistake to assume they were always paying me a compliment, by the way.

So I've always viewed myself as 'clever' just as I've viewed myself as 'female' and 'brown-haired' - that last being less definitive as I 'mature' - without really thinking too much about what it means. Clever was just a label among a bunch of labels, and it was good or bad depending on who said it. Being brown-haired was the same. Some people like brown hair, but not a single picture book princess except Snow White ever had dark hair, and at the age of seven I worked out that was because of narrative necessity.

I looked it up in the dictionary today. In fact, 'clever' is not so much an attribute, as a skill or a practice: "mentally quick", "original", "bright", "nimble with hands or body".

You know that rush you get when you do something new for the first time? I hope you do. You only get it when you do something difficult, something you're not 100% sure you're going to pull it off... When you do, it feels great. It feels even better if you've tried several times and those attempts haven't worked.

It happened yesterday to me. That's' when I had the 'aha!' moment (also known as a Blinding Flash of the Obvious). I actually felt clever. I put a paypal button into a promotional email. [Did you just lose faith in my cleverness that I found this difficult? Or were you impressed too?]

Later, I showed a colleague how to do a couple of keyboard shortcuts. She was over-impressed, never having used them before or even known they existed. She also worried that she wasn't as quick at them as I was. Ah, perfectionism, that arch-enemy of development...

"Look, you don't think you're clever because you know the way to your kids' schools to pick them up do you?"

"No, of course not."

"That's because its something you've done a thousand times, which is why its easy and you don't have to think about it."

"Yeah..." Where are we going with this?

"Those keyboard shortcuts are like that for me. Someone showed them to me years ago, and I've used them nearly every day of my life since. If I had a dollar for every time I've used them, I'd never need to work again."

What old skill do you take for granted? What new skill could you acquire if you stuck with it through a few attempts?

This is post 3 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.

Real artists ship: 100 Posts in 100 Days

Coulda Woulda Shoulda Didn't.

Pretty much sums up the past year here at opinonatedchildlesswoman.

"Real artists ship" according to Steve Jobs, and quoted by Seth Goden in his latest book, Linchpin. For the longest time, I haven't been shipping.

"Shipping means hitting the publish button on your blog. ... Shipping is the collision between your work and the outside world." (p.103)

Wow: reality check. I could cite a hundred good reasons why I haven't been around. But mostly it's just resistance, that inner voice that protects the ego from failure, usually by paralyzing me with self-doubt.

So here's my challenge, and my promise: I will post at least once every 24 hours for the next 100 days.

Let's see what happens.