life lessons – actuality.log

How to get good at things

2 January, 20232 January, 2023

I often run into people (especially those early in their learning journeys) who suffer from massive imposter syndrome and feelings of being mediocre. I find myself giving the same versions of the following advice, so I thought I’d take the time to write it down with a bit more coherency in one place.

There is no great shortcut to getting good at something. You need to work hard at it, make a ton of mistakes, and learn from those mistakes. That’s it, this is the entire playbook.

But this playbook is really hard to follow for one very specific reason. And this is that your ability to critique things is vastly better than your ability to create things. It’s easy to gauge your early work as mediocre, get dejected and quit. Ira Glass expresses this beautifully in the following video.

Ira Glass on the creative process.

The way around this conundrum is to truly internalise a couple of facts.

The first of these is that you are not especially mediocre (even though it can often feel this way when you compare yourself to others). Most people are pretty mediocre at most things and literally everything you see around you was made up by someone no smarter or capable than you. You can create and improve upon anything.

Steve Jobs’ secrets of life.

The second thing — and this is perhaps more important — is that experiencing failures as you try and giving your brain time to learn from them is the only way to mastery. I’m not saying this in some philosophical sense, I am expressing this as a scientific fact. Research indicates that experiencing errors trigger neuroplasticity. i.e. they trigger chemicals that inform your neural circuitry that they have to change.

Huberman Lab Podcast episode talking about using failures to learn faster.

So summarising these two facts, my advice to you is this. Instead of comparing yourself to others and thinking of them as exceptional (and yourself as mediocre), use them as an existence proof to see that if they can do it, so can you. Then, try to cast experiencing (many, many) failures as a positive part of your learning journey. This will keep you going as you get better and better at whatever you are attempting.

Don’t let your fear of being imperfect stop you from getting good at things you care about.

Happiness is overrated

10 August, 200918 November, 2009 2 Comments

So here’s what I just realised: I’m in an unfulfilling relationship. It took me a long time to arrive at that conclusion, and, quite frankly, I’m still not certain whether I can clearly articulate what the problem is. But here’s me trying.

I’ve come to realise over the course of my existence that happiness and sadness, levels of prosperity or contentment and a host of other things are just states of being. As hard as society has tried to condition me into thinking otherwise, I firmly believe that none of these states are inherently better or worse than any of the others. They’re all little more than strokes in the rich canvas of life; some cheerful and colourful, others deep and morose. And as with any masterpiece that isn’t doused with pretty pastel shades, a life needn’t be filled with joy and contentment for it to be meaningful, moving or even beautiful.

I don’t see why more people don’t see this. Why is there a constant quest for happiness and prosperity and popularity? What’s wrong with knowing fully well who you are and what you have—and being fine with everything, including how you feel about it?

Now, I’m generally a very negative person. (But you already knew that.) I don’t see it as a problem, and I don’t want to fight to change it. And this brings us back to what I was trying to say in the first place. I’m in a relationship where I’m never allowed to be morose without incident. I can’t be bitter or sarcastic, nor can I say mean things about the world which I feel has denied me so much. I can’t peacefully sit in a corner and mope, nor can I hold conversations where I repeatedly bring up past mistakes or revisit bad memories.

But guess what, all that stuff—the queasy feeling that comes in my tummy from all that stuff—feels right to me. I don’t want to constantly talk only about positive things. I don’t want to plan for and “fix” any of these things in the future. I don’t even want to fucking smile sometimes. I just want to be who I be, and not have the conversation topic turn toward the one thing I dread the most: Women and their insecurities. How she doesn’t feel adequate. How she’s not pretty enough to satiate me anymore. How she’s not a wonderful enough aspect of my life to make me cheery.

A man can’t just be melancholic anymore and have it be nothing to do with another.

The war of art – I/II

7 May, 20087 September, 2009 2 Comments

It’s strange how things worked out, but almost as if it were planned, my extremely annoying and painful sore throat and cold cleared completely for the few days of my recent trip to L.A. But sadly for you, I promptly reverted to my unwell self on returning home, resulting in such a delayed update.

(Kinda like the temporary parting of the seas to allow divine beings to cross. Except, there weren’t any divine beings involved here, nor were there any seas to cross.)

I’m so glad (and quite proud, actually) that I decided to go through with my trip. The entire experience was a blast and threw me so much out of my element, it was exactly what I yearned to feel. While things were rather hectic, and with my inexperience frequently coming to fore, taxing, and sometimes even terrifying (I don’t recall ever being yelled at like this since I was in third grade), I got to hang out with a bunch of people whose lives are completely different from my own, opening my eyes to perspectives so very different from mine; which is exactly why I took the trip.

The entire “training” over these few days revolved around hammering home a couple of crucial ideas:

Ensure you have a clear concept in mind before rushing to set up a shot.
You’re responsible for everything in your shot’s frame, so be very aware of what’s in it, and why.

These instructions seem pretty basic, but with the whole environment frequently deteriorating to something of a chaotic scene from a high-pressure creative-competition-based reality show (Top Chef, Project Runway), they were easy to forget. From the oafs nearly starting fires and nearly breaking furniture, to the big wigs and drama queens needing everything to go precisely “the one true way” or you surely got what was coming, to the 30-few year old women huddled on the floor crying after being lambasted for deviating from “the one true way,” the whole place was a circus. An entertaining, magical circus where you actually caught a glimpse of the pressures involved in being a professional photographer—and picked up lessons on handling it.