Learn how the pros do it
Have you read the instructions? (Image from Story of the Mince Pie, 1916)
The other day, a friend sent pictures of five pies she and her wife had made.
"Recipe testing," she said.
And I had to laugh. Of course. Recipe testing. That makes so much sense. And I've never done it.
It's another example of how people who are good at a thing have a fundamentally different approach from those who aren't. The people who are good at the thing use a different set of tactics that yields much better results. Sadly, the people who aren't as experienced or accomplished don't take advantage of these tactics, and then judge themselves as bad, hopeless, or untalented. In reality, they would do so much better with a slightly different approach.
As a competent singer, I cringe whenever I hear people sing "Happy Birthday" in a restaurant. It's not just because it sounds bad—it's because no one is following any of the basics to make it sound good.
When experienced singers get together to sing a cappella (unaccompanied by instruments), they use a pitch pipe or a hummed starting tone to help them agree upon which of the TWELVE DIFFERENT KEYS they are singing in and orient them to that key.
However, when inexperienced singers get together to sing, they just open their mouths and start singing pitches that only have a one in twelve chance of matching the pitches that the person next to them is singing. And even if everyone were to gradually modulate to the same key, the key they end up in might be too low or too high to be comfortable for the singers.
Singing can be challenging, but it doesn't have to be that challenging. Taking a few seconds to plan ahead makes the group sound vastly better even if no one is a particularly polished singer.
We can adapt techniques from the professionals to help us get through all kinds of obstacles. The other day, I had to write some difficult marketing copy. It was very tempting to hand off to someone else, but I realized that they would need a brief to tell them what the copy was supposed to say. So I wrote the brief.
And then what? I imagined myself from the copywriter's perspective. I figured that they would write a first draft based on that brief and then revise it. So that's what I did. Within a half hour, I had my marketing copy completely written.
In the past, I would have tried to write the copy, gotten stuck, and run away. But if a professional copywriter needs to work from a plan and make multiple revisions in order to create a polished result, why did I think I could write it on the first try directly from my own head?
Such unrealistic expectations perpetuate a cycle in which we wrongly ascribe good results to talent when they are actually the result of a well-designed process and consistent effort over time. That, not talent, is what makes a professional.
Many of us, having achieved mastery in one or more areas of our lives, find ourselves caught up in expecting ourselves to be good at a thing that we haven't learned how to do. We have no process for it, yet we think we can intuit a solution.
When I picked up a concertina for the first time, I thought I'd be able to play it. I could make a sound on it, but there were no jigs and reels freely flowing. My capability was closer to "Hot Cross Buns." It turned out that I couldn't just skate by with what I already knew. I had to learn new skills and practice them consistently.
Learning new things is fun. There's only a problem when there is a mismatch between what we think we should be able to do and what we can actually do. The skills and techniques required to be successful may seem self-evident—you just open your mouth and sing, right?—but there may be more to it that we don't know about.
To resolve our frustration, we can stay alert for the possibility that we've made assumptions about the work we're trying to do. We can seek guidance to help us get better. While we may be disappointed by our initial results, the situation is far from hopeless. We simply need to learn how the pros do it.
