Reflecting on improving interactions with the world
Just some thoughts that bubbled up today on the topic of skills
Idk I think I have so many skills and it turns out you can just learn a little at a time like
Oh did I learn how to work with networking equipment in one go? Nah I learned One thing that was simple, and another time after that I learned another thing and after a few more Times I can say if I needed the job, yeah I could be a network tech. And in uni I actually was for a short time. Now I can wire a house, and fix up problems I have. I can exert control over that aspect of my reality, and it feels great to do! It took almost two decades and a handful of opportunities that I said to myself “yeah I’ll try doing that myself”.
I have done this with car stuff, I’m still not great but I take the time to try learning how to do a thing, and if the barrier to entry is too much foundational knowledge, sometimes I say ok, we won’t do that today. But if I keep learning things, at some point in the future I’ll come back to the same problem, and lo, I’ll have learned enough to solve it that time around. I’m still not a huge car person, I usually just go to the shop, but again, it’s nice to know I could do it myself.
Same thing with music composition(specifically chiptune), I’m dogshit at it. I have almost no musical background/education. I’ve had ab 3 short attempts. The first time, the tooling/software put me off, I couldn’t understand enough to make any headway. A few years later I had had exposures that made the second time easier, and I toyed around a bit, and got scared what I made didn’t sound alright. I just did my third round of this, and I got a little further, I cranked out a shitty but tangible little track. I know if I keep at it, I’ll get somewhere.
Life really is that simple sometimes. you just have to be patient and realistic with yourself and have reasonable goals. What you might not realize if you’re getting dejected ab trying to do something to a degree of quality, is you actually have no idea what details of that thing make it a Quality work. You’re a beginner and you simply don’t have the experience to calibrate your expectations into something realistic. So your expectations range is sitting at some point in infinity that doesn’t make a lick of sense, its this super ambiguous fog of the impression of greatness. But you’re operating with that impossible goal because it’s an unconscious thing a lot of us do. you have to step back and realize you don’t know how to do the thing in a quality way, but if you keep pecking at it, you will. So I guess you could point out, it’s really about fucking up making the thing a lot, and as you do that, you look at why your perception is telling you it’s fucked up, and you try to correct it a little the next go-round. Sometimes the correcting is a shot in the dark, and you fuck it up different. Sometimes you find a good resource and they help you see it a little different, and you fuck it up different, but also get a little bit more of it Right. And sometimes it’s really obvious what you fucked up and you can correct it immediately. And that’s just how it goes. Everything you could call a skill, works like that. Walking, speaking a first language, speaking a second language, art, science, hell, even thinking works like that.
So pick stuff up, play with it. If it’s too hard, put it down but be open to trying again later. Realize you’re going to have to make the effort, but that every single human who has ever lived has made that effort. And at the beginning a lot of your labor will end in lessons and not triumphs. But this is why we find meaning in this stuff.