This post will be shorter than the last essay on technique. One reason is that there is certainly less to say - working hard is something that seems trivial to most people. However, as I will now expose, a lot of our intuitions and commonly held beliefs about work are also inaccurate or misleading.
The first one I already touched upon in the previous article as it relates to technique - simply working hard at something often isn't a sure recipe for success. In fact, often in life, hard work gets you nowhere, or at least doesn't get you further than where you currently are. Society in the United States glamorizes hard work, and the idea that with it one can pull oneself up from their bootstraps, and in so doing come from a meager or humble background and achieve great things. This is the vision of equal opportunity in America.
You don't have to be a Marxist to know that things don't always turn out the way they are depicted in this idealized version of society. This doesn't in any way undermine the incredible value and importance of equal opportunity, but it's important to be reminded that sometimes hard work doesn't yield the appropriate payoff we all sometimes think it does or should. The same is true in competitive hobbies and sports. In these endeavors it can be especially discouraging to put in a lot of time and effort, not meet the results you want or expect, and then be told by someone that you simply didn't work hard enough. Or, for example, working much harder than someone else but only seeing one half of the results they do. Sometimes we expect our hard work to pay the proper dividends, and when it doesn't, we give up in frustration. We sometimes conclude we aren't good enough for achieving.
That's why I brought up technique in the last article as the solution to this dire problem for anyone who wants to succeed at any endeavor. It is indeed true that anyone who works hard at something should achieve improvement in their results over time, but sometimes people don't because they are going about it the wrong way.
There are many causes for this. Sometimes the proper ways are far from obvious or intuitive, and progress is practically impossible without access to a large body of knowledge and an instructor to relate that knowledge to you and make it comprehensible. There are some people who don't have a good sense of how to work, because they are disorganized in their thinking and haven't been taught to think about method and approach. I used to be of the latter kind. When I was growing up, I had a lot of innate ability in everything I tried. I naturally came to think of things in terms of being good at them, or bad at them. I didn't pay much attention to my methods of learning, because riding on ability alone I was able to outperform almost everyone else with minimal time and effort put in. Of course, there came a time when ability alone was not enough to carry me, and unfortunately this was when I was already a Junior in high school. My usual straight A's slipped into B's and finally the occasional C, and I didn't know what to do. I had a bit of an emotional breakdown at that point with regards to academics - what was wrong with me? Was I simply not good enough to graduate high school? An odd conclusion to someone looking in from the outside.
There are many people who had a similar path through life as me, and there are many more reasons why some of us are not particularly attuned to method, technique, or habits of working that make our time spent much more efficient. Since high school, I decided I would try to work much harder at the things I do, so as not to repeat the mistake of laziness in my youth and riding on talent. However, a new problem revealed itself: I would waste enormous amounts of time getting nothing done, because I had no idea HOW to work having not done it before. This was one of the worst experiences for me - now I WAS putting enormous time and effort in, and I knew I was a pretty talented person - yet still I continuously met with failure.
What was missing? I hadn't the faintest clue for a long, long time, but gradually I began to discover that there was a big hole in my thinking that had never been filled. It has taken years to chip away at this issue and think outside my own box to conclude what is wrong. I finally realized that my methods and approaches, as well as learning habits, were all pretty terrible, and had been since I was young because I had not spent my youth working very hard at things. I mentioned in the technique article, it is crucial to learn these things when you are young and forming habits. Or else you'll end up like me - now I am practically an adult learner in my own learning!
However, once I discovered what the weak part of my learning process was, it was an amazing revelation for me. I've realized that the ability I've had for so long has been largely untapped. I've also come to understand more about myself, and that the weaknesses I have are more like holes in a giant juggernaut or battleship that, when plugged up, will make a formidable adversary. Not everyone has shared my particular struggles, but the goal of covering the three topics of technique, work, and learning is that anyone with any particular weakness can analyze their own path through life and discover a way to improve their own approach.
The final point about work ethic is that psychological factors, such as motivation, play a large role in being able to work hard consistently for long periods of time. The incentive for working hard in this case is the reward of mastery over a skill, which is seen through incremental improvement over time. There is no end to a journey like this - it is really about the journey itself. As mentioned, the number one destroyer of motivation is lack of progress, and once this is resolved, motivation problems often straight up disappear and an upwards spiral results which replaces the downwards spiral. The upwards spiral in particular is a phenomenon that explains a lot of people with great skill in some area. They have the right approach early on, which leads to quick acquisition of their skill and quick improvement, which improves their self-esteem and confidence to take on more challenges, which leads to more improvement and more esteem from their peers, which leads to increased motivation, etc. This is a big part of that 'optimal trajectory' I mentioned in part one of this series.
It is important to make your skill fun to keep you interested. With my piano playing, sometimes I will download a score from an incredibly difficult work that I absolutely love, cut and paste an excerpt from it, and just mess around and see what I can play. In particular I love watching or listening to live performances, and checking out the sheet music or following along with it. This isn't very efficient or direct at improving and I realize it, but in the end it's all about the music. It's all about the passion and the drive, which is a large part mastery. There is no doubt seeing yourself improve is one of the greatest pleasures. but there is always something more. There is always something else - just feeling it, and loving what you are doing. It's about creating something. In art this is true, but in so many other hobbies it is equally true - in Chess, many players consider themselves artists, and in KZ, there are probably some extremely dedicated players who liken their game to an art form (maybe koukouz?)
-CoC
No comments:
Post a Comment