The Life-Affirming Pleasure of Learning a New Skill

Your brain is magic. When was the last time you took it out for a ride?

Being a beginner sucks.

Especially in adult life. We fall out of practice. Somewhere through growing-up, we unlearn how to begin. Fear gets to us and gnaws on our ambitious, wearing a lot of masks like ‘practicality’ and ‘seriousness.’

We deny ourselves the fundamental joy of exploration and progress.

When we’re kids, we don’t know we suck. We don’t know much about anything, and we certainly don’t know what we don’t know. Our worlds are tiny, bright, and scintillating with possibility. Everything is a learning experience, because we have to put everything together from scratch. All those little neural nubbins in our young brains have to stretch out and grasp one another.

None of that changes the fact that, as an adult, it sucks to feel like a beginner. We gather skills in our youths, in early adulthood, and we get good at things. Maybe they’re side-talents and hobbies, maybe they’re job skills. Ideally, we achieve a somewhat marketable mixture of both through education and direct experience.

By now, you’ve been good at some stuff for a while. Maybe not the world’s leading expert, but you’re not a brand-new beginner anymore. You’re not wet behind the ears. You’ve been around that block a time or two. This is not your first rodeo.

As a result, when you step into the arena of something totally unknown to you, the skill gap feels like a bottomless, insurmountable chasm.

Because one thing you’ve gotten very good at is the skill of self-comparison.

Whether you’re watching the expert at the front of the class or gazing at the ultra-Pinnable examples of a finished project, you’re staring across that chasm. You know how it should look (or feel, or taste), but you don’t have the first idea of how to get there from here.

Or, worse yet, you think you know. But the result isn’t anything like you hoped. It’s your own personal episode of Nailed It!, but way less fun and no applause.

Like I said. It sucks.

It sucks right up until the point at which you do it again. This time, you know better what to expect. And, you know, it actually did come out a bit better this time.

Live, laugh — learn

Actually I hate this quote, unless it’s used like this. But that’s beside the point. Learning must be a lifelong pursuit. It’s essential for survival. Just like the deprivation of air, food, and shelter will eventually wither you away, life without learning starves your psyche.

Some of that learning happens passively along the way. You have that stuff you got good at in your youth and early adulthood, and as you keep doing that stuff, you get better at it. Maybe new technologies or ways of thinking arise and you expand the way you accomplish a task. I hope you will embrace these things as they come, because they will come, and being stuck in the past eventually looks bad on everyone.

I also want to extol the virtues of adding new skills. New, strange, wildly unrelated skills. Stuff you won’t pick up at a conference in your industry or resource center in your department.

I’m talking about taking a deep breath and plunging into something as a genuine, truly sucky, beginner.

Give your ambitions freedom to run

Sing, dance, speak French, fold origami, make pie crust from scratch… When was the last time you saw something cool and thought to yourself, Man, I wish I knew how to do that?

What happens when you give yourself permission to begin?

First, let go of the mask-wearing fear that tells you stuff isn’t for you. There was a time in your life you didn’t feel that way. You could approach things without fear of failure or foolishness. You didn’t worry what someone would think when they saw your efforts or cringe at the idea of being criticized or ridiculed.

Then, stop comparing yourself to people who’ve been doing that thing their whole lives. Or even the last year. Or six months. You must learn to stop comparing yourself to everyone. Learning takes time, and people accomplish it differently.

Both will be a lifelong struggle — skills to develop in and of themselves — but I promise you, it’s worth it. The rewards far outpace the effort.

Taking your first wobbly steps toward mastery are nothing short of exhilarating. If it’s been a while since you started out on that journey, you’ve forgotten how it feels.

A while back, I was working on a free online trigonometry course from Khan Academy. I’m the kind of lifelong words person that limped and cried my way through the bare minimum of math credits to graduate high school. But, as an adult, I didn’t want that to hold me back too much from potential future study that (still) might involve math.

I struggled. The old familiar hot flashes of frustration blossomed into my face as I sat there cycling back to the same types of problem over and over again because there was stuff I just couldn’t solve.

Until I could. After a few weeks of putting in twenty or thirty minutes here and there between my jobs, these weird abstract concepts started to relate to one another. I daresay even make sense. I started to understand how, yeah, using circles and triangles really could help you construct and solve functions that you could use to express real-world data.

I was elated. I texted my mom and told my closest friends, jabbering on about how I actually understood a math thing. A math thing most of them had learned in 11th grade at the latest, but a math thing nonetheless. A math thing I had not learned in 11th grade.

Y’all, math got exciting, okay? It’s still hard for me, and I’m still behind where I ought to be if I’m to go back to school. However, knowing that my brain can understand if I feed it enough time and patience is a big confidence booster.

I had the same experience with belly dance during my year and a half of classes. I never got past beginner level, but feeling my brain and muscles grow into new kinds of movement and coordination made me feel strong and powerful.

Moments like this can carry us a lot farther than the initial high of accomplishment. When we begin new things — which we have to do eventually — it helps a lot to keep in mind how it feels to suck. How it feels to climb out of your inexperience.

Don’t quit at peak suck

Please, dear reader, give yourself this gift!

I’m not saying there won’t be things you try only to realize immediately you do not enjoy.

But quitting something right at the beginning because you didn’t like your very first results guarantees you feel the worst about that effort. Give yourself a chance to learn, to gain the muscle memory, to connect the neurons. Let your energy have a minute to breathe and your effort space to pay a dividend.

You don’t have to become a world champion or Instagram royalty to do something well enough to enjoy it. Stepping out into something new has the power to shake up your thinking and renew your desire.

If nerves are getting the better of you, begin in secret. You don’t have to tell anyone, but I’m willing to wager you’ll have more fun if you do.

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