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tetrahedral_connectionI'm not really sure where I want to go with this. "This" being Dreamwidth, or really quite a few other dimensions of life at the moment. But we'll stick to it meaning "this website" for now. I guess if I wanted a perfectly private set of journals, I could stick to the paper notebooks I've been not-using for that purpose for decades now. If I wanted something more public, something akin to Tumblr might be a more useful forum. At the moment I find myself writing, effectively, to an audience of exactly two people. Which is a interesting way to conceptualize journaling. Do I account for external viewership? I suppose part of me is going to consider that no matter how many people I do or don't have following me. Even in my hard copy journals I censor things I don't even really want myself coming back and re-remembering later.
I don't know.
I suppose I don't *have* to know.
That hits on a concept I've picked up on recently. I realized it when I decided I was thinking about the idea of maybe trying to learn a new skill recently. Notice the deliberately missing word "started". I was interested in learning a particular style of historic weaving, because I'm constantly picking up new projects and concepts to dabble with and bad at following through with any of them for more than the length of a project or two. But I guarantee you that I own all of the standard tools and supplies for a regularly-practicing novice of all of those skills.
In our weaving example: as soon as the thought passed through my head that I was vaguely interested in tablet/inkle weaving, I was scouting the internet for books and reference materials, I'd gone to Joanne and purchased yarns in five colors, and had to make a deliberate decision not to buy a multi-yard-capable loom. I did not yet know a single thing about how to inkle weave. I did not know if I was capable of doing it, or if I even liked it. But dammit I was going to have everything it took to look like a fully-prepared expert before I even hit the metaphorical water.
And this is not even a small outlier in my behavior. I'll attribute a little sliver it to having been a Boy Scout; BE PREPARED is still a mantra I keep close to my heart. Some of it is fear of the unknown; I feel "safer" if I feel like I'm fully equipped to take on the new task. But a lot of it, I think, is the Fear of Not Being Perfect.
Like what I feel like is a shocking percentage of my peers, I didn't struggle much intellectually when I was younger. Honors track, full schedule of APs, getting As without...well, I won't say "without effort", but perhaps "without extreme effort". This was, of course, well received by my support network, and rewarded. At a certain point, that level of performance simply became the expectation. I was at the very least decent at most of the things I applied myself to. Without taking quite a long digression into the states of privilege that allowed that to be true, or how the reactions of myself versus my parents changed over time, it definitely remained an expectation that I had of myself. I saw myself as someone who was Good At Things. I fully absorbed the message of my childhood that You Can Do Anything At All If You Try. Which was on one hand, a marvelous thing. I had very little fear of branching out into new subjects. I would very infrequently hold back from trying out something new because it was outside my specialty, because history told me it wouldn't take all that long to fold it into Things I was Good At. I had a lot of good experiences that I can safely cite that as a cause of.
However, that isn't a sustainable trend. Beginner's Mind is a hell of a drug (and that's a whole 'nother post I'd love to make sometime) but it isn't a Be Good At Everything Forever card. You push on your boundaries enough, and you'll find where they hold firm. That can be...hard to deal with. Some of my worst plateaus in fencing so far have come from being a talented beginner who's told he's excellent for his experience, and then coming up against Actually Skilled Folk. I would hazard that only 20% of the roadblock is the actual improvement I needed to make, and the rest was the recalibration it took to accept that I wasn't at the level I thought I was.
Coping skills varied by the activity. Fencing is about the only one that I've been able to successfully complete that mental reassessment and get back to trying it. That's a huge factor in why I've clung to it so strongly over the last five years. What usually happens is that I get through my first project with a decent amount of success, soak up all the "Wow, that's really good for someone who's just getting started!" kudos that I can find, and promptly move on to the next variant before I can get to the point of needing more than enthusiasm to produce a result worth being proud of. If you think that is perhaps a deliberately harsh interpretation, you're certainly right. That's definitely not the rationale that I use when actually making those decisions, but I have seen myself move on from item to item and skill to skill enough to wonder if it's not a behind-the-scenes cause. I think that the SCA's enthusiasm for the amateur actually makes this worse, because the continuous beginner ends up with more positive feedback than someone who's taken the time to actually be properly good at something. Where, to someone looking for validation, it becomes better to be a permanent initiator than a dedicated expert.
I'm becoming a little verbose and far afield. Let's bring it back to the original point. The end point of the process I've been so far describing is the idea that, in order for something to be worth doing, you must be good at it. If you have been traditionally good at things, you expect to be good at anything even if it is new to you. If you are not, you are unworthy and shameful and a failure. As one way I've attempted to circumvent this, I've noticed that I try to emulate the appearance and equipment of experts, as if that will in itself confer their expertise to me. It's another layer insulating me from the shame of Not Being Excellent; my kit wasn't perfect, of course I didn't get it right. I need better tools, I need my own tools, I need to be perfect from the very beginning. From even before the beginning. I can't even contemplate trying something new without a plan and the supplies in place to ensure that I am incapable of producing anything less than good work.
Ye gods and little fishes, it's exhausting.
I'm not sure what to do about it, either. I *like* having equipment and supplies that I don't have to return to someone, that I can use to continue to work with at my leisure. And maybe I find, as was the case with all the things I bought while working on cosplay armor, that having a tool solves many more problems than the one I bought it for. But it's expensive, and impractical, and just another layer of excuses that I'm tired of having to at least consider before I get going on what should be something done purely for the enjoyment.
I will pretend that I'm giving someone with identical circumstances advice on the matter, because it's always easier to advise someone else than to convince yourself to make changes.
- Perfection is the anathema of good. Something done is always better than something not done, regardless of the degree of done.
- An amateur places his work next to a master's and despairs because their work is obviously lower quality. The observer is thrilled to see two pieces instead of one.
- Sucking at something is the only way to become any kind of good at something.
- If you have never done something, start now. In ten years you will be excellent if you start, and you will remain terrible at it if you do not start.
Yes I realize those are effectively four rephrasings of the same sentiment. I'll finish with the following:
For the love of God, Hark, you can borrow supplies to get going so you know whether or not you even like something before you own the materials to do it for a year.
I don't know.
I suppose I don't *have* to know.
That hits on a concept I've picked up on recently. I realized it when I decided I was thinking about the idea of maybe trying to learn a new skill recently. Notice the deliberately missing word "started". I was interested in learning a particular style of historic weaving, because I'm constantly picking up new projects and concepts to dabble with and bad at following through with any of them for more than the length of a project or two. But I guarantee you that I own all of the standard tools and supplies for a regularly-practicing novice of all of those skills.
In our weaving example: as soon as the thought passed through my head that I was vaguely interested in tablet/inkle weaving, I was scouting the internet for books and reference materials, I'd gone to Joanne and purchased yarns in five colors, and had to make a deliberate decision not to buy a multi-yard-capable loom. I did not yet know a single thing about how to inkle weave. I did not know if I was capable of doing it, or if I even liked it. But dammit I was going to have everything it took to look like a fully-prepared expert before I even hit the metaphorical water.
And this is not even a small outlier in my behavior. I'll attribute a little sliver it to having been a Boy Scout; BE PREPARED is still a mantra I keep close to my heart. Some of it is fear of the unknown; I feel "safer" if I feel like I'm fully equipped to take on the new task. But a lot of it, I think, is the Fear of Not Being Perfect.
Like what I feel like is a shocking percentage of my peers, I didn't struggle much intellectually when I was younger. Honors track, full schedule of APs, getting As without...well, I won't say "without effort", but perhaps "without extreme effort". This was, of course, well received by my support network, and rewarded. At a certain point, that level of performance simply became the expectation. I was at the very least decent at most of the things I applied myself to. Without taking quite a long digression into the states of privilege that allowed that to be true, or how the reactions of myself versus my parents changed over time, it definitely remained an expectation that I had of myself. I saw myself as someone who was Good At Things. I fully absorbed the message of my childhood that You Can Do Anything At All If You Try. Which was on one hand, a marvelous thing. I had very little fear of branching out into new subjects. I would very infrequently hold back from trying out something new because it was outside my specialty, because history told me it wouldn't take all that long to fold it into Things I was Good At. I had a lot of good experiences that I can safely cite that as a cause of.
However, that isn't a sustainable trend. Beginner's Mind is a hell of a drug (and that's a whole 'nother post I'd love to make sometime) but it isn't a Be Good At Everything Forever card. You push on your boundaries enough, and you'll find where they hold firm. That can be...hard to deal with. Some of my worst plateaus in fencing so far have come from being a talented beginner who's told he's excellent for his experience, and then coming up against Actually Skilled Folk. I would hazard that only 20% of the roadblock is the actual improvement I needed to make, and the rest was the recalibration it took to accept that I wasn't at the level I thought I was.
Coping skills varied by the activity. Fencing is about the only one that I've been able to successfully complete that mental reassessment and get back to trying it. That's a huge factor in why I've clung to it so strongly over the last five years. What usually happens is that I get through my first project with a decent amount of success, soak up all the "Wow, that's really good for someone who's just getting started!" kudos that I can find, and promptly move on to the next variant before I can get to the point of needing more than enthusiasm to produce a result worth being proud of. If you think that is perhaps a deliberately harsh interpretation, you're certainly right. That's definitely not the rationale that I use when actually making those decisions, but I have seen myself move on from item to item and skill to skill enough to wonder if it's not a behind-the-scenes cause. I think that the SCA's enthusiasm for the amateur actually makes this worse, because the continuous beginner ends up with more positive feedback than someone who's taken the time to actually be properly good at something. Where, to someone looking for validation, it becomes better to be a permanent initiator than a dedicated expert.
I'm becoming a little verbose and far afield. Let's bring it back to the original point. The end point of the process I've been so far describing is the idea that, in order for something to be worth doing, you must be good at it. If you have been traditionally good at things, you expect to be good at anything even if it is new to you. If you are not, you are unworthy and shameful and a failure. As one way I've attempted to circumvent this, I've noticed that I try to emulate the appearance and equipment of experts, as if that will in itself confer their expertise to me. It's another layer insulating me from the shame of Not Being Excellent; my kit wasn't perfect, of course I didn't get it right. I need better tools, I need my own tools, I need to be perfect from the very beginning. From even before the beginning. I can't even contemplate trying something new without a plan and the supplies in place to ensure that I am incapable of producing anything less than good work.
Ye gods and little fishes, it's exhausting.
I'm not sure what to do about it, either. I *like* having equipment and supplies that I don't have to return to someone, that I can use to continue to work with at my leisure. And maybe I find, as was the case with all the things I bought while working on cosplay armor, that having a tool solves many more problems than the one I bought it for. But it's expensive, and impractical, and just another layer of excuses that I'm tired of having to at least consider before I get going on what should be something done purely for the enjoyment.
I will pretend that I'm giving someone with identical circumstances advice on the matter, because it's always easier to advise someone else than to convince yourself to make changes.
- Perfection is the anathema of good. Something done is always better than something not done, regardless of the degree of done.
- An amateur places his work next to a master's and despairs because their work is obviously lower quality. The observer is thrilled to see two pieces instead of one.
- Sucking at something is the only way to become any kind of good at something.
- If you have never done something, start now. In ten years you will be excellent if you start, and you will remain terrible at it if you do not start.
Yes I realize those are effectively four rephrasings of the same sentiment. I'll finish with the following:
For the love of God, Hark, you can borrow supplies to get going so you know whether or not you even like something before you own the materials to do it for a year.
