How successful people learn new things
See? You got this. (U.S. National Archives)
Years ago, I was training a new employee. She wanted to improve a particular skill, so I recommended a book on the subject.
Weeks later, she asked a related question. “What about that book I recommended?” I asked.
“I’m reading it,” she said.
In that moment, I learned something important about communicating my expectations. I had thought she would spend an afternoon or two reading the book to quickly learn and implement the material; however, she was actually reading two or three pages a night before bed.
Her way was perfectly reasonable, but it meant that she would take almost three months to read the book. That created a long gap in which she would have to do without the necessary expertise.
As a professional educator, but even more importantly, as a professional “learner,” I see this gap come up a lot. Someone who achieves mastery of a skill — especially someone who achieves mastery quickly — tends to approach the process very differently from the person who tries and fails (or quits). The person who succeeds takes action on scale that would never occur to the person who dabbles.
For example, if I want to figure out how to play a song by ear, I may listen to the same ten-second clip thirty or more times. I don’t even think about it — I just listen, try to duplicate what I’m hearing, listen again, try again, and so on. If I’m totally focused on the eventual goal of playing the song, this won’t bother me at all; I know that I will eventually get it.
However, I have discovered from my work as a teacher that lots of people don’t do this. They quit after three or four attempts, thinking that they just aren’t good enough to get it or that they must be doing something wrong. They get discouraged or tired and stop trying. They’re keeping score instead of getting absorbed in the process.
If you want to succeed in a big way, just go for it. Instead of reading three pages in a day, read a hundred; instead of painting one bad watercolor in an afternoon, paint ten; instead of wading, inch by inch, into a cold lake, jump in.
These are all simply choices we can all make. They don’t require prior experience, a special certification, or extensive therapy. If this isn’t your normal modus operandi, you can start out by pretending it is. Do what a successful person would do. Really, you just kind of flail around for awhile until you get your footing and it gets a bit easier. And I promise that it will.
As you do more, you will get better: You’ll discover better questions to ask, better resources for information and assistance, and better tactics for achieving your goal. You’ll notice nuances that weren’t possible for you to see before — nuances that are harder to see if you’re only devoting ten minutes a day to your endeavor.
I’ve seen students stall out for years because they can’t deal with the pain of not already being good at something. I’ve seen students make three years of progress in just a few weeks. Best of all, I’ve seen the people in the stalled-out group become the successful ones by changing their behavior and mindset. The choice is up to all of us which way we want to go.
If you want to be successful, do the things that successful people do until you achieve what you set out to do. We don’t really want to believe it’s that simple, because that means that we have to do the work. We can’t hide behind lack of talent or time or circumstances. However, our success is ultimately up to us and the effort that we put in. To master a skill may require much more effort than we are used to. That isn’t difficult or wrong; just unfamiliar. The more we practice taking action at a higher level, the easier and more familiar it becomes. It even becomes enjoyable — and that’s when the real magic happens.