The art of insanity

Channeling water into the city from the mountains more than ten miles away? It’s an idea so crazy it just might work. (Image by NakNakNak)

One morning, I woke up thinking something I’ve never thought before.

Remember that old cliché about the definition of insanity? Supposedly Einstein said it, but in reality, he probably didn’t. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

Before I even got out of bed, it occurred to me that it’s this “insanity” that we must confront when we’re learning a new skill or trying to create something new.

We have to suspend the fear that what we’re doing is foolish and pointless. We have to let go of the worry that we’re wasting our time and that our effort is all for naught.

It’s not. It just seems like it is. It only seems like nothing is happening.

Doing the same thing over and over again is actually likely to lead to impressive results over time. It’s not insanity. It’s the path to mastery.

We first show up and face the frustration of being a beginner, like my friend Cindy who is learning to knit. We deal with the naysayers, critics, and doubters (the ones who share our homes and the ones inside our own heads). It looks like we’re so far from success that we couldn’t possibly reach it.

But all the while, if we persist, our brains are working determinedly on our behalf to lay down new neural pathways and streamline operations in ways that we are not consciously aware of.

The next morning, having processed everything we learned the day before (that is, until we gave up in tears), we are better. We don’t realize it because we’ve already moved the goalposts — we’ve unconsciously changed our expectations to accommodate our new level of skill.

It may be hard to measure our progress, just like a child or a lilac bush doesn’t look too different from one day to the next. Nevertheless, the growth is happening.

After guiding hundreds of children through the process of learning to play a musical instrument, it’s obvious to me that we all start with different levels of talent. But I’ve also observed that talent is only part of the story. It just dictates how quickly and easily you will acquire a particular skill, not whether you will. It’s reasonable that we quit things that don’t yield an immediate and obvious return, but our willingness to persist in the face of that apparent lack of talent is what will determine our ultimate level of success in a given pursuit.

In other words, if we can tolerate being bad at something long enough, we’ll get good at it.

If I have a special talent in life, it is the ability to expect and embrace the disappointment of the early learning process right from the start. I look at my awful swatch, my ugly eyeliner, my poor tennis serve, or my boring video and think, “Yep! This is about right. This is about where someone would think, ‘I just don’t have the talent,’ and give up.” And then I don’t give up.

Yeah, it may indeed be foolish or insane to think that I can overcome the obstacles to learning a new skill or establishing myself in a new arena when all evidence is to the contrary.

But I have the audacity to believe that I can figure it out if I just stick with it. And then I do. And so can you.