Actually, that first thing isn’t really correct. I don’t like practicing that doesn’t seem to have a point. I want to get good at things, without looking like I'm not good at them, and in my teenage brain, there was no connection between stumbling over endless scales and etudes and the parts of music I really wanted to be good at. So I started playing guitar instead, and happily spent hours on weekends playing songs I actually wanted to know how to play, with no one judging me based on how much time I spent playing.
There’s no getting around the fact that becoming good at something requires that you be bad at it first. But the way we teach that to kids is often counterproductive. “Practice makes perfect” is basically meaningless, and also not true. You’re never going to be perfect at anything; that would require an infinite amount of practice. The best you can ever be is amazing. Not that we tell children to strive to be amazing. Nor do we tell them it’s okay to look like you’re bad at something when you’re bad at that thing.
My dad came closer to making sense with a Russian proverb: “Repetition is the mother of learning.” But I got tired of him saying that long before I found any skill I wanted to learn by repeating it. And when I did find one, I was surprised to learn that I’d been practicing for months before I even noticed I was bad at it.
That was knitting. I spent six weeks repeating a single gesture, and didn’t realize that’s what was going on because I was focused on the scarf at the end of the journey. And even then, I didn’t put two and two together until nearly five years later, when I started watching art streams on Twitch, including marathons of Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting (and knitting while I watched, of course).
Bob Ross put it this way: “Talent is a pursued interest. Anything you practice, you can do.” That got me thinking. As a kid, everyone told me I was talented, rather than skilled, and that made me think I should be able to do everything right the first time, and that it reflected badly on me if I didn't. (This is another thing I only noticed years later, with the strength of Tumblr Discourse behind it.) What if talent and skill were the same thing? That might actually make practicing worth it.
At about the same time, Alex Steacy announced that he was going to start a webcomic (warning: full of toilet humor), so he could learn to be okay with being bad at drawing. I read the comic, and watched a few of his drawing streams, and between Bob and Alex I realized I wanted to become good at drawing, and that the way to become good at drawing was to spend some time being bad at drawing first. It was okay to look bad, to be discordant, as long as you were doing something you enjoyed and were dedicated to getting better at it. And so I started the Pokemon Art Challenge, which I post about in my weekly crafting updates. (That link is to the series in chronological order, so you can see how much I’ve improved since November 2016.) And the really funny thing about that is, even my bad drawings get praise from people who don't draw at all, because they can see the work I'm putting into it, even when the result isn't great.
In spite of all this positive reinforcement, my brain doesn't entirely get how being bad at things leads to being good at things. I have to teach it one hobby at a time. My most recent success has been with Magic: the Gathering. Last fall I posted about stepping back from Magic until I no longer put so much of my self-worth into it, and losing was no longer the end of the world. Some time after that, I started going to Lady Planeswalkers events again, and I told myself I was going less to play the game and more to spend time with interesting, nice people. And the more I went, the more I convinced myself it wasn’t about doing well at the game, the better I began to do at the game. Last night was my second draft this month where I won two rounds in a row.
Not sure what hobby is next. Maybe I’ll go back to music, and try to teach myself not to be self-conscious about practicing singing.
Here’s to a grand future of being bad at stuff.
No comments:
Post a Comment