How to Improve at Anything
Two Simple Ways to Get Better, No Matter How Good You Are
No matter what the skill is, writing, photography, playing the guitar, or alpaca farming, the path to improvement is the same.
You learn what you are supposed to do and how to do it and practice those things repeatedly.
And if you are persistent, consistent, and intentional, you will improve.
But what happens when you reach the inevitable plateau? Maybe you feel like you are barely getting started when the improvements taper off.
Or maybe you make the mistake of thinking that you have mastered the craft and no longer need to improve.
And a mistake it is.
I have taken on and ‘mastered’ many things in my life, including tile installation, running, computers, photography, and writing. And now, I am trying to add guitar to that list.
Alpaca farming? Not so much.
But one thing I learned in every one of those endeavors is, there is always something else to learn. As a matter of fact, the ratio of what you know to what you don’t know is a sliding scale.
It’s not like there are 100 things to know, and when you know 50 things, you are halfway there. Knowledge doesn’t work that way.
When you begin, there may be 100 things that you know about you need to know. But by the time you have learned 50 of them, you discover there are 200 more things you don’t know.
If you think you know everything about a subject, then you are a fool. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, but trust me, I can be harsher. (Is that a word?)
So, whether you know a little or a lot, you want to know more. You’ve exhausted the normal channels that you are aware of. Maybe you took an apprenticeship, or attended classes, read a lot of books. Perhaps you have depleted the ultimate resource of modern education, the pinnacle of higher learning, the oracle of wisdom, YouTube.
What then?
You can’t find any more books on the subject or YouTube videos. (Actually, you will never run out of YouTube videos, they breed like tribbles)
Anyway, you still have a thirst for knowledge but don’t know how to proceed. There are two avenues that will always work. And best of all, they are both simple.
- Find Someone Better Than You
- Start Over
There is Always Someone Better
In my list above, somewhere between tile and running, I shot pool for a while. I wasn’t any Minnesota Fats. I wasn’t even Eddie Felson. But I could hold my own. And in my time shooting pool, I learned there were two types of good players. Those that wanted to win every game and those that wanted to get better every game.
You can’t do both.
The only way you get better at billiards, besides practice, is always to play someone better than you. This means losing. A lot. But every time you lose, you get a little better, because you learned some little trick from the master.
And eventually, you beat the master and have to find a new one, grasshopper.
Before the tile days, I played a game called foosball. You can still find a table here or there, but during the early 70s, they were more popular than bell-bottomed jeans or patchouli incense. And I was good. Me and my partner ruled the local foosball parlor and won every game. We put a quarter on a table at the start of the night, and that was the last quarter we spent.
And then one day, a new gunslinger rode into town. His name was Weird Harold. I’m pretty sure that’s not the name his mother gave him, but it’s the only one anybody knew. We had heard of him but never seen him. He put a quarter on our table, and when we had wiped out the last team, he stepped up.
“Where’s your partner?”
“Don’t have one. I’m going to beat you two by myself.”
“One-handed.”
I could see Eli Wallach squinting in the sun on a dusty road while an Ennio Morricone instrumental played in the background.
It was actually Pink Floyd’s Money, but you get the picture.
We faced our first defeat in months and learned a valuable lesson.
There is always someone better.
And you need to find that person. Whatever the craft is, find someone better and watch them or listen to them or read their words. You will learn what you didn’t know. You will learn what you didn’t even know you needed to know.
Fortunately for me, in my current three endeavors, writing, photography, and guitar, there are a lot of people better than me, and the internet will deliver them all up to me for free.
So know this. You are never the best. There is always someone better than you, and they can teach you what you don’t know.
Start Over
I have done this in photography often, and I can see the day coming soon when I will try this with the guitar.
Start over.
Start from day one with the most basic lessons you can find and approach them as a complete beginner. You will always, always, learn something.
Here’s the thing. When you were a beginner, you didn’t know anything.
That’s what being a beginner means.
And suddenly, all this information was being foisted on you all at once.
Controls, lenses, equipment, shutter speeds, apertures, ISO, composition, dynamic range.
And that’s just for alpaca farming.
Sorry, wanted to make sure you were still paying attention.
Those are just some of the things you can start learning on day one with photography. In guitar, you have strings and frets and notes and chords and time signatures and keys, and you haven’t learned your first song.
So, in all of that, you will miss something. Of this, there is no doubt.
Something is going to get buried behind something else, or the concept is so foreign you have no context for understanding it.
But you push on and learn the other things, and over time you continue to get better.
And maybe, you pick up on those things you missed.
Or not.
I consider myself a skilled user of Lightroom, Adobe’s photography management system. I have used it daily for years. There are some things I don’t know because I don’t need to know them. Things I don’t do or that I do differently. But all the basics, I know.
Or, thought I did.
One day, I applied this principle and was watching a beginner lesson on Lightroom. The instructor got to one of the modules I frequently used and did something I had never seen before. Or didn’t remember seeing if I had. Something that was quite handy.
“Wow, I didn’t know that.”
As you learn things, you pick up most of it, but some things slip through the cracks. Or you learn it, but you learn the wrong way of doing it. Or there is a better way of doing the same thing.
Either way, sometimes, you should just start over. Get a new book, buy a new course, or just find some YouTube videos.
But make sure they are for absolute beginners. And approach it as if you don’t know anything.
You will learn something new. I can guarantee it.
Did you know that Ohio has more alpacas than any other state?
