A lifetime of learning (or maybe just three months)

Just a few more rehearsals and we’ve got this. (State Library of Queensland)

I keep thinking I’m going to run out of stuff to talk to you about. But the cool thing is that I keep learning and growing. I’m not just having new ideas about stuff to write — I’m having new ideas in general, triggered by the events and circumstances of my life.

And one fresh idea is something I’m calling the threshold effect. This concept has been coming up lately as I talk to parents about how to help their kids pursue passionate interests, making the most of the abundant free time that so many of them have during this phase of the pandemic.

Sometimes, kids (and adults) are hesitant to commit to a particular endeavor. They’re not sure if they want to be in it for the long haul. They’re not sure if they want to make the investment of time necessary to reach mastery of a particular skill.

But if you knew that six weeks from now, you could be competent and confident, would that change anything? If you could see the end in the beginning — and that end were attractive and not too far away — would you be willing to dive in?

For me, most of the time, the answer is yes. I know that if I put in the work, I can go from “not a tennis player” to “tennis player” or “someone who doesn’t know how to use watercolors” to “someone who knows how to use watercolors” within a relatively short time. I just have to be willing to, as one of my clients put it, get through the awful part where you want to throw your equipment out the window. Eventually, I’ll make it to the other side.

Unfortunately, mainstream learning practices aren’t set up this way. We have piano lessons every week for a year instead of every day for a month. We take seven year-long classes as a sophomore instead of seven month-long ones — or thirty-six one-week ones. We’re encouraged to be well-rounded instead of obsessive. As a result, we are on a long, slow ride to nowhere when we undertake an exercise program, the learning of an instrument or a language, or a complex handcraft. We never build up enough momentum to get through what Seth Godin calls The Dip. We abandon our activity without ever gaining competency.

To fix this, we have to reach the threshold of competence as soon as possible. When we do, we can abandon our activity and move on to the next thing after having learned how to do it well. I haven’t knit anything in six weeks, but I don’t feel guilty about it. I don’t feel like, “Oh, I used to knit,” or “Ugh, I wasted all this money on needles and yarn,” (well, actually, I do feel that way sometimes, but that’s because every time I go to a new city I make a beeline for the yarn shop). Because of the threshold effect, I can knit competently anytime I want to; I don’t have to start over and I don’t have to go through the pain of learning again. I’m good enough that I’m not going to lose my skills. It’s the same with guitar: I haven’t played much lately, but I’m not going to forget how. I have a baseline of competence that will never leave me, even if my calluses soften and I get a little rusty on my most challenging tricks.

On the other hand, my French skills have never quite reached the threshold of competence necessary to maintain fluency. I have never been conversationally fluent, so each time I undertake the study of French I have to build myself back up again. I study for a few weeks and then peter out. If I were to spend those same few weeks in a French immersion program, I would probably reach a level of competency that would be sustainable in the long term, even if it still took a little work to brush up if I went a long time without speaking French.

People hem and haw about which language to learn, which instrument to study, or which medium of art to get into. I’m here to say that it doesn’t matter as much as we might think. We don’t have to commit years to the project — it can just be a few weeks or a few months. Then, having gotten satisfyingly good — or good enough — at whatever we’re working on, we can move on to something else. We haven’t given up. We haven’t lost interest. Rather, we achieved what we set out to achieve. We reached the threshold of long-term success. Time for the next project!