Now we’ve got those pesky genes out of the way; we can come to a startling conclusion. Everything in life is a skill. And you can improve any skill with practice. Imagine if you have never seen a basketball in your life. Not in person, not on TV, not even in a book. Then you show up in some neighborhood, and you see some people shooting free throws. They’re making about eight out of ten; they’re pretty good. You ask if you can try. They give you the ball, and you try. You miss nine out of ten. You conclude that you simply can’t “do basketball” and you never ever try again. Ten years later you’re at some party, and some of your friends are talking about shooting baskets. You shake your head and say, “Gosh, I can’t shoot baskets like you guys. I tried once, and it didn’t work out.” Would this make any sense? Of course not! Yet some things in life we instinctively realize are skills, and in order to get better, we just need to practice. Yet other things we try them once, and we can’t do them, so we figure we’ll never be able to do them, and we give up. In reality, everything is a skill. The more you practice, the better you get. Well, that’s not true. You have to practice correctly. If you keep doing same thing and expect a different result, well you know how that goes! Insanity.
Wrong Practice Leads To Frustration
If you wanted to bake a cake, and you have never done it before, and you didn’t have any kind of recipes, and you didn’t know about the Internet, then you’d have to wing it a few times. You might imagine there’s some kind of flour and sugar in there, so you’d mix up a bunch, put it in the oven (since you heard people talking about cakes and you’re pretty sure you heard them say “bake”) and out comes this lump of gunk. So maybe you try something else. Suppose instead of sugar, you poured in some apple juice. That didn’t work. Next try, you mixed in some salt, Tabasco sauce, and some bacon. Now you’re going in the opposite direction. On the one hand, you are trying different things. If you have enough time and enough ingredients, eventually you might get a cake. On the other hand, you might end up in the hospital. Clearly, trying different things just to be different isn’t enough. You need to keep trying different things, but you need to pay attention to feedback. You need to know what things are getting you closer, and what things are getting you further away.
Right Practice Leads To Mastery
If you’ve ever downloaded a complicated piece of software, and figured you’d just “wing it” then you know that some things just can’t be learned without an owner’s manual, or a lot of patience and time. However, most things are not like that. Especially things that involve other people. Ideally, the best way to get increase any skill, in any area of life is a very simple process. Not easy, but simple.
Take Action
The first thing you need to do is try something. Anything. This is when you mix some flour and sugar and stick it in oven just to see what happens. Often times the very first try in any endeavor is “just to see what happens.” And one of the real secrets of life is to keep this mindset for as long as you can. Just try something a little differently, and see what happens. As soon as you start to expect a certain result, and that result doesn’t happen, that’s where the frustration starts to come in. At any rate, you won’t get any result if you don’t take any action.
See What Happens
This is when you take that sugary hard lump of flour out of the oven. It certainly doesn’t look like a cake, but let’s taste it anyway. It’s kind of sweet. Maybe a little bit too crunchy. Could maybe use some flavoring. Being completely open to what happens, or feedback is essential. If you expected a cake from mixing flour and sugar, you’d be disappointed and maybe you’d quit. But you just wanted to see what happened. Now you have valuable feedback. This is what they mean in NLP when they say, “There is no such thing as failure, only feedback.” It helps a lot if you don’t expect success. Meaning you don’t ever expect anything other than something hopefully close to success. Sure, if there’s one second left on the clock, and your team is down by one point, and you only have one free throw left, then you certainly aren’t going to just “see what happens.” But if you are in that situation, hopefully, that won’t be the first time you’ve ever shot a free throw!
Increase Your Understanding
Now that you have more knowledge of the system, you can get ready to try something different. That cake-thing was sweet enough, but lacked flavor, and it was the wrong texture. So let’s keep the sugar to flour ratio the same, and add in some strawberries. The result we get will be a little bit better, but not quite. If you have access to any other information; books, online resources, friends, this is the place to access them. “I tried X and Y and got Z, but I was hoping for Q. Any ideas?” That’s all you need to do.
Take Further Action
This is when you make another attempt. Each iteration through this simple process will get you more information. The more information you have, the more likely you’ll get a good result. Perfect result, no, but a good result, yes. The only time you stop improving and start getting frustrated is when you expect perfection. When you start to kid yourself that this is the very last time you’ll need to do something. If you are doing something simple like baking a cake, then you will get to a point where you decide that the result is “good enough” for your purposes. Then later on, when you have a different purpose, you can improve your cake baking skills or any other skills
Patience Is Required
Obviously, some skills will take a long time to learn. If you expect to become a black belt in Aikido overnight, you’re going to be disappointed. If you expect to learn how to play Moonlight Sonata in an hour, you’re going to be disappointed. But with enough patience? You can learn how to do anything.
Exercise
Spend an hour or two learning how to juggle. Most people don’t know how to juggle three simple objects, like bean bags, and are duly impressed when they see somebody that can. Anybody can learn to juggle if you take an hour or two of consistent practice, spread out over a week or two. Try to juggle, and see how lousy you are. Then commit to spend five or ten minutes a day. Don’t see it as “trying to juggle,” where every time you don’t juggle, you are a “failure”. See yourself as “learning to be good enough to juggle for one in front of your friends.” Practice saying this out loud if you start to feel like a “juggling failure.” See learning to juggle as a choice, rather than something you “can” or “can’t” do.
