The Art of Learning New Tricks as an Old Dog: feedback and taking lots of turns

It becomes increasingly difficult to learn new things as an adult. I am convinced, however, that this observed fact is not because the adult mind is less adept at learning than it was during childhood or adolescence. It is instead because adults have, over the course of their lives, developed a complicated web of phobias, bad habits, and misconceptions about themselves that puts barriers in the way of learning new things.

"Portrait of an Extraordinary Musical Dog" by Philip Reinagle (1805)

By the time you reach around 30 years old, it is easy to simply conclude that it's a matter of genetic destiny that you are no good at certain skills and never will be. You simply say "I can't draw," or "I can't write well," or "I'm no good at Spanish," and leave it at that. Once that type of self-talk becomes part of your identity, and you become "the sort of person who can't draw or write well," it is so easy to spend the rest of your remaining life self-fulfilling that prophecy. You will never bother to get even 10% better at drawing, or writing, or speaking español through the power of deliberate practice the way you might have when you were a foolish and uninhibited youngster.

The best way to learn something is to try it out and fail miserably, get feedback and advice from an expert source on how to do it a little better next time, and then take another turn. Take lots of turns. This is why it is valuable for everyone to try to learn a musical instrument at some point in their lives. Music learning teaches the power of deliberate practice over a long period of time, and the results of practice are apparent in a particularly objective way for music compared to other complex creative skills. When you started learning music you probably couldn't clap a tricky rhythm, and then you worked at it deliberately for a while, and then you could do it a little better, and eventually it was flawless and automatic. The progress over time for musicianship is obvious because many typical practice exercises on rhythm and pitch can be "right or wrong" in a way that has no easy analogue for more subjective creative tasks such as acting, writing, storytelling, painting, or filmmaking. Once you prove that you can use deliberate practice to improve your music skills, you can use that success to apply deliberate practice to anything.

On Taking Lots of Turns

I recently started reading The Improv Handbook-The Ultimate Guide to Improvising in Comedy, Theatre, and Beyond, by Tom Salinsky and Deborah Frances-White. My initial reasoning for wanting to study the techniques of improvisational theatre is that I could use the ideas and apply them towards having better telephone conversations, answering and asking better questions at job interviews, thinking faster on my feet, and delivering better speeches in public.

However, as I started reading the Improv Handbook, I came across a series of passages that described the barriers to learning new things that are endemic in adults, barriers to learning any new thing.  I found the following passages so wonderful and compelling that I will quote them here in full:

...The words "Can I have a volunteer?" often ignite feelings of fear and anxiety. People who have paid to be at [a] class, or have sometimes paid for three years of drama school, will often avoid eye contact with the teacher when the request is made.

It is not always like this, however. On some occasions, if a volunteer is asked for, every single person puts their hand up and some actually rush forward. That's when those people are children.

Children approach playing games, or doing exercises or being given the chance to try something new, very differently from adults. Children approach these situations with one mission, and that mission is to have lots of turns. They sometimes actually rate their success that way, saying something like "I had four turns and Charlie only had three—I win!"

Adults are very different. We want to sit back, assess—from our seats!—whether we'd be any good at the task in question. If we think we'd be successful at it, then and only then will we want a turn. If we think it is something we would not be good at, we would usually prefer to have no turn at all.

Children want lots of turns, but adults want one perfect turn.

As adults, we've already decided what we're good at and what we're bad at, and we only want to have turns at things we're already good at. We've met lots of people who've told us they can't draw, but none of them was seven. All children think they're brilliant artists and want their drawings displayed on the refrigerator. As adults, even if we secretly think we can draw, we hide our sketches away under the bed: "Don't look at those—they're just some silly things I was doodling." The thing is, we all were those children. We believed we were great artists, we sang and danced when we were happy and acted out cops and robbers for hours. No one ever stopped and said "I'm not a very good robber. I've run out of ideas. I think I need to research my character." We always had endless ideas. Endless positivity. Endless faith in our own talent. What happened to us?

One answer is: our education. We hope at least that your education was free because, wherever you got it, it has screwed you over and transformed you from someone who volunteered fearlessly and believed in your own creative abilities into someone who is unwilling to get up at all in case "you make a fool of yourself," and who claims they "can't" sing, dance, draw, act or speak in public and who has no imagination.

When you're at school, if the teacher tells the class to write an essay and everyone else is writing, and you're sitting there all Zen and relaxed, thinking about your essay, what will happen? The teacher will shout at you. She'll say "You! You're not even trying." She would know if you were trying because trying looks like something. If your shoulders are hunched and you look worried and a little ill, then the teacher will probably come and do it for you. We learn to look anxious before we do things—like we're not up to it.

We also tend to punish ourselves after we do things. Two adults will volunteer for something, and after they finish they'll make a physical gesture of apology which says to the room: "No need to mention it—we know it wasn't very good." Maybe this is because we teach our children to punish themselves if they suspect they've failed. When you're a kid, if you're washing dishes and you break a plate and you say "Well, never mind, everyone drops things from time to time," and you clean it up in a relaxed and happy fashion, your mother will shout at you. This in our society is a "bad attitude." A "good attitude" is to cry and feel worthless. Then your mother will say "Never mind, darling, it was only an accident," and then clean it up for you. Therefore, as adults, we anticipate this; we've learned to. We look anxious before and after everything we do to avoid punishment from others.

This means we come to any learning opportunity feeling tense and anxious. If that was a good state for learning or creativity that would be great, but unfortunately you're less likely to be good at learning—or any creative pursuit—with a gun pointed to your head. The fact is you're the most able to learn, create and improvise when you're most yourself. Think about it: Are you more witty, sparky and full of ideas when you're with your oldest friends and a bottle of wine or when you're on a job interview? Your inner improviser is far more likely to be with you when you're relaxed.

It follows that the people who are most successful at learning to improvise are those who are most relaxed. We tell our students that their only mission is to have lots of turns and see if we're worth our money. We say "I'm the only one who's shown up claiming to be an expert and therefore I'm the only one who should be nervous." If they can already do everything we show them very well, that makes our job very difficult. As teachers it's our job to find things the students can't do and show them how to do them. Education is not coming to the workshop pre-educated. We tell them "I'm hoping for a very high level of failure in this workshop, otherwise how can I take your money in good conscience?"

This blog is primarily a vehicle to engage in deliberate writing practice so that I may become a better writer over a long period of time. I plan to take lots of turns. My intention is to become not only a better writer, but also a clearer thinker, and a more attentive reader than I was when I began. The blog format is better than writing in a secret notebook or diary because the entries are searchable, dated and timestamped, allowing any progress over time to become more apparent (and safer from being lost during a cross-country move). It also allows me to "take lots of turns" writing in a natural way, and experiment with different writing styles and genres. Blog posts can be commented upon, and the traffic results for different articles can be compared to one another, providing a mechanism to get valuable feedback on the quality and interest from the readers. Some day, I hope to be able to write well enough, and write interesting enough things, that I could write a whole book (or several books) and then take your money in good conscience.

As such, any feedback is always welcomed here: any comments on writing style, the content of the ideas, what's boring, what's not. Does something I wrote make you angry? What do you find interesting? Pretentious? Condescending? Annoying? Uplifting? Poetic? Let me know, and I will certainly appreciate it.

Für Offred: A Handmaid's Tale Lost Chapter

The following was originally written in the spring of 2007 as an assignment for Toni Lefton's "Science and Literature" elective class at the Colorado School of Mines. The assignment was to write a "missing chapter" for the book we were reading as a class at the time, Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale. She chose my writing from among the class submissions and read it aloud because she liked it for some reason, an unusual occurrence. Toni also encouraged me to keep writing and just see what happens. I promptly ignored her nice comment thinking, "LOL, I could never make a living writing whatever I want for fun, Ima go to graduate school nao." As you might know, The Handmaid's Tale is a little rambling with a kind of first person stream-of-consciousness style, so that's apparently the style my 21-year-old self tried to emulate.  It's also quite short because I think I wrote it the night before it was due (as undergraduates often tend to do).  I thought it deserved at least to see the light of day somewhere rather than languishing on an old hard drive, dying a slow digital death.

"Such songs are not sung anymore in public

…They are considered too dangerous."

-The Handmaid's Tale (pg. 54)

=======================================================================

Für Offred

He got it for me. Nick. They can get things sometimes, from the black market. He knows that I would get in trouble if they found it, knows that it might be traced back to him. I tried to make him keep it. It is a present he says. Present, a gift, I remember those. The now. There is only the now. ‘The here and now,’ they used to say. Is everyone present? I know I’m not. But where do I hide it?

In the folds of my habit, the red curtain covers my virtues as well as my sins. But it’s a small one. I didn’t know they made them that small, really. It fits easily in a pocket. It could hardly contain anything but its own machinery. Maybe a locket, I wonder whose picture it might have held? But I can’t keep it there forever. I creep down the mushroom-carpeted stairs as I have done before. Glide across the grass, always careful, into my room, with its false sense of privacy. I could hide it in the FAITH pillow, no, they would notice the weight. They would take it away, they take things away. The mattress, that is where you hide things, it’s traditional. Young boys and their dirty magazines. Or a stolen half-pack of cigarettes. Parents never check under mattresses, they never think to look there. Of course they do. But that will never do. The princess and the pea, I couldn’t sleep with it under there. I am the princess and my pea is this little wooden box. I used to like those spy movies, Luke watched them all the time, movie marathons, running. They can hide a pistol in the pages of a Bible, I can hide this.

The mattress is stuffed with cheap cotton batting. No springs, springs can be sharpened, they won’t let us escape that way any more. It happened a couple times before they fixed it. They couldn’t think of all the ways it could be done, at the start of it all. Open a little red seam, that’s what some of the girls did. Open a little seam, is what I do, too, backing out the threads with my fingernails. It will take some time, but it’s worth doing if I want to keep my treasure. Dig out some of the batting. It’s like building a robin’s nest, or planting a seed. I’ll dispose of the cottony earth later. Yes, this spot will do nicely.

I used to have one of these before, Luke gave it to me. It, too, was a present. It was made from one of those exotic woods, monogamy? It had a big butterfly inlay, traced in ebony with mother-of-pearl wings. Butter-fly, fly away. There were little silvery swirls in the corners too. It used to tinkle out Beethoven, Für Elise. I wonder who Elise was. I wonder which melody would trickle from my new music box. I can open it without fear because it isn’t wound up. Everything else is so wound up.

This new box is simpler. Pine, lovingly sanded but unstained. Unstained. There are no corners, they have been gently rounded off. Like a cheap six-sided die. Like a wooden cooler that plays music instead of chilling tiny beverages. Like a wedding ring box. The hinges are slightly worn.

If I knew anything about making music, I could guess what it would play. It’s like a little cylindrical puzzle in raised bumps of metal, a player piano for ants. They tickle the metallic teeth of the comb and the room shimmers with music. Tickle teeth and music comes out, does that make sense? Tickle, trickle, tinkle. It is never dancing music anyway. Music from boxes is always slightly haunted.

I’ll never be able to play it. How could I? There is no place far enough from prying ears. The Commander’s office? He’ll wonder where I got it. The time spent with Nick can’t be wasted on such frivolity. You stupid shit, you should have left it with him.

I’ll just have to imagine the lush sonic scenery in my ears. How I miss it, music just for the sake of music. It used to be everywhere, in elevators even. There used to be elevators. If you intend thus to disdain; It does the more enrapture me; And even so, I still remain; A lover in captivity. I wish I could wear her Greensleeves, or Bluesleeves. Anything but Redsleeves.

Build the world you want to live in

I think I stumbled across a guiding principle for my life today.  It’s called “Build the World You Want to Live In.”  The key operating word here is build, which is a much stronger statement than choose.  Choosing is important, too.  It’s a way of voting, of endorsing a version of the world that someone else has built.  But I don’t want to just choose, I want to build.

“Build the World You Want to Live In,” is a better credo for shaping a career path than “Follow your passion” or “Try to get paid for doing the thing you’re good at.”  Your passionate desire could be solving thousand-piece cardboard jigsaw puzzles all day long, and you could innately be the world’s best solver of cardboard jigsaw puzzles.  But that should hopefully not be the basis for your career, for your life’s work...unless you genuinely believe that your puzzling is contributing to a better future world where more and more people are solving more and more cardboard jigsaw puzzles.

I want to live in the sort of world where people use evidence, experiments, and argument to back up their claims, instead of making things up or enforcing ideas with fear and intimidation and an environment of persistent ignorance.  That’s why I studied science, and evangelize for more scientific thinking every chance I get.  But I also want to more actively be a better-world-builder, which is why I am currently gravitating more towards engineering, entrepreneurship, and writing for public audiences.

I know someone who wants to live in the sort of world where people use their carefully conserved cultural heritage to revel in the creativity of their ancestors, to learn from their mistakes and their triumphs, and above all to empathize with people who made tough choices in the past.  That’s my wife.  She used that vision to become a historian and an archivist.  I want to live in her vision of the world too.

Some people think:

“I want to live in the sort of world where people appreciate the teachings of Jesus more.”
- Be a pastor.
“I want to live in the sort of world where more hearts are touched and inspired with music.”
- Be a pianist.
“I want to live in the sort of world where people have more variety in customized plastic keychains made from the cheapest, lowest quality materials I can find.”
- Be a crappy plastic keychain maker.
“I want to live in the sort of world where lots of people make their living stealing from ships and threatening peaceful sailors.”
- Be a pirate.

Even if it’s an awful world you’re building, as long as it’s aligned with the principle that you are building the world you really, actually want to live in, then you are welcome to go ahead and try building it.  I will just take comfort in the fact that you can be prevented from building an awful world by other people...people who want to live in a different world where there are not so many crappy plastic keychains or oceanic pirates.

I can use my “build a world” tool to help think about politics, and how other people I disagree with are thinking about politics.  Deep down they might be thinking...  “I am worried that by endorsing any form of abortion, my neighbors are building a world where people thoughtlessly view human life as disposable.” or  “I am worried that by endorsing homosexual marriage, my neighbors are building a world where I might be grossed out for a second if I accidentally see two men kiss, or my gay neighbors might trick my children into not producing grandbabies for me.  That would be a disaster.” or  “I am worried that by endorsing the legalization of recreational marijuana, my neighbors are building a less economically productive, and less physically safe world for me and my children.”  Everyone you disagree with politically on hot-button issues seems a lot less stupid, and a lot more compassionate, when you think about things this way.

I can use the “build a world” idea to think about competing ideas for economic systems.  Some people think, “I want to build the sort of world where I live in a luxurious castle, and I want all of my neighbors to live in mud huts.  I get to live in a castle because my daddy lived in a castle.  My neighbors get to live in mud huts because that's where their daddies lived.” or “I want everyone to be equal in every possible way so badly, that I will build a world where all of my neighbors’ talents and wealth are systematically handicapped and redistributed, Harrison Bergeron style.”  Hopefully with evidence and argument and persuasion and experiments and historical precedent, we can eventually sort out the ideas that end up building a bad world from the ideas that end up building a better one.

I can use the “build a world” idea to help decide where to live and the community of friends and colleagues I want to establish.  Do I want to live in the sort of world where people live in big houses, but have long commutes and “no time”?  Do I want to live in the sort of world where I can frequently collide with people who have a wide variety of interesting thoughts and opinions, or surrounded by a pocket of people who always think the same thoughts and have the same opinions? (Or retreat to a lonesome corner of the world where I’m not bothered by any pesky people at all?)  Do I want to live with only old people, or only young people, or a mix of both?  Is the town I want to live in full of lots of builders, too, or is it only full of people who want to choose and buy the creations of the builders?  These are much more important considerations to me, personally, than details about whether a particular neighborhood has lots of granite countertops, or pleasant weather, or a consistently winning sports team.

It’s a nice new lens for me to view the criticism of creative work: of a novel, of a movie, of a painting, of a product, of a business, of an essay, even of a system of bus routes.  Is the critic saying “I wish I lived in a world where you were more prepared and thoughtful than you are right now, and I want to help you to build something better next time.”  Or is the critic really saying, deep down, “I could never have built what you have built, and I am envious of you, so I will criticize your accomplishment in order to make it seem smaller than it really is.”  I guess that’s why they call it “constructive criticism,” there’s the building part right there in the expression.

I can use this idea to think about how to design and instill values in my growing family.  Do we want to be the sort of family that only visits Disneyland, or the sort of family that visits the world's largest refracting telescope?  Do we want to be the family that watches television together, or the family that tours art museums together?  How do my wife and I decide which family traditions to keep and which new family traditions to create?  Build the family you wish you had grown up in.

How can I decide what activities I need to pursue on a daily basis?  I could ask myself, “Does this activity lend me credibility, knowledge, skills, credentials, personal connections, or capital that might help me eventually build the world I want to live in?”  I suppose I could maximize the activities that answer that question with a “yes,” and minimize the activities that answer that question with a “no.”

My “build a world” principle finally makes sense of why I have always hated complainers so much.  They only have half of the equation.  They know which sort of world they want to live in, and they know they currently sure as hell don’t live in that world, but they aren’t willing to do the really hard building work it takes to make a big change.  Better to complain and complain until someone else comes along and builds it for them.

I thought of the initial germ of all of these ideas after reading a chapter about the evolution of morality and free will, in a book called Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. Dennett.  In a portion of the book, he argues that there is not really such a thing as true altruism, but there is such a thing that he calls “benselfishness.”  Benselfishness is when you engage in cooperation with others, you engage in almost-altruism seemingly for the sake of others, and you seem to do good things as much as you possibly can, merely because you are actively trying to build the sort of world that you want to live in.  And more importantly, from the point of view of evolution, you are actively trying to build the sort of world you want your children, and your children’s children to inhabit some day.  How benselfish of you!

Here’s to the builders.

New Directions

I have decided to change the focus of this blog, to open it up to a wider range of interests beyond simply language learning.  I still want to learn languages at a slow burn over the course of the rest of my life, and language practice may still appear in these pages.  However, I also want to practice consistently writing and editing more complex thoughts in my native language of English, in styles other than the scientific manuscript writing I generally do.  I also want to maintain only one consistent writing space rather than having multiple blogs.  Since I have already invested many hours into writing in this blog, I have chosen to change its title and focus instead of starting from scratch.  Since I really currently have a consistent audience of one, and perhaps a small number of strangers who stumble in from Google...I think no one will really mind these changes.

-- Josef

"come un fulmine a ciel sereno"

Voglio includere in questi post del blog più frasi e modi di dire italiani.  Ho realizzato, fra capo e collo, di punto in bianco, come un fulmine a ciel sereno, devo imparare le espressioni idiomatiche.  Stai tranquillo, caro lettore, userò queste espressioni solo ogni tanto.

"come un fulmine a ciel sereno"

Scrittura la scienza è difficile

Scrittura la scienza è molto difficile.  Ci sono tanti dettagli piccoli!  Tutte le parole devono essere vero!  Tutte le figure devono essere perfetto!  Dobbiamo non scrivere troppo noioso!  Tutti i riferimenti devono essere corretto!

Ho sempre lotta con procrastinazione.  Per la verità, sto scrivendo questo post del blog per più procrastinare.  Devo tornare al lavoro...


aggiornamento:  Ho finito il manoscritto e lo ha inviato via e-mail al mentore.