David R. MacIver's Blog
Current thinking: Play and self-improvement
This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/current-thinking-play-and-self-improvement.
Hi everyone,
This is the (currently) weekly paid newsletter where I just talk about some things that I’ve been thinking about in the last week.
Play before exercise
As you might know I’ve been taking singing classes. They’re going pretty well, which is not to say that my singing is at all good.
One of the problems I’ve been having at getting good is that I absolutely am not doing as much practice as I ideally would be between classes. As a result, progress is is very slow.
I recently had an what is in retrospect a blindingly obvious realisation: The reason I wasn’t doing any practice is because I wasn’t singing for fun. My motivations for singing classes were all wrong - I want to be able to sing, but that doesn’t work, what I have to actually do is want to sing.
You can see this in my answers to questions about why I’m taking singing lessons: It annoys me that I can’t sing, I want to be able to improve my control of my voice, it would be good for my public speaking, etc. None of these actually require me to do much singing.
My experience is that the easiest way to become good at something is to like doing it to the point where you spontaneously practice it and think about it, and no amount of grit and determination can substitute for that.
So, if anything the most important thing when learning a subject is to start by figuring out how to have fun with it, and only worry later about how to actually get good at it, and as a result I’ve been spontaneously singing a bit more since I had this realisation (so far only on my own, I’m not quite ready to inflict that on others). I think it’s helping, but more importantly I’m enjoying it.
Needless to say, this is utterly the opposite of the model of learning we’ve inherited from school.
I’ve been thinking about Lockhart’s “A Mathematician’s Lament” a lot recently. In particular, the following passage:
Sadly, our present system of mathematics education is precisely this kind of nightmare. In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.
Everyone knows that something is wrong. The politicians say, “we need higher standards.” The schools say, “we need more money and equipment.” Educators say one thing, and teachers 3 say another. They are all wrong. The only people who understand what is going on are the ones most often blamed and least often heard: the students. They say, “math class is stupid and boring,” and they are right.
I think we repeat this pattern over and over again in how we learn, and we need to do better if we want to actually be good at things. As radimentary puts it, you’re not trying your best if you’re not happy.
The therapeutic value of getting good
Back in Have you tried just being good at it? I argued that for a lot of emotional problems there’s an “easy” solution: Just get good at the thing that’s bothering you.
(I am decidedly erratic about following this advice because it’s not actually easy at all)
I’m increasingly thinking that this works well even for skills that you’re not currently in some sense “blocked” on. People are carrying around a lot of insecurity around the things they’re convinced they’re bad at, and even if you don’t need those things in your day to day life it’s a good way to exorcise some demons.
Singing has been an example of this for me. Another comes from Alexander Technique lessons I’ve been taking. I’m still not totally sure what’s going on in Alexander Technique, but one clear win is that I’ve been taught to play catch.
I’ve a long history of being fairly physically uncoordinated, and feeling self conscious about that, and generally very much living up in my head as a result. Getting good at physical skills seems to help with that, and being able to adequately throw and catch a ball is a fairly central example of this.
I sometimes notice this in others too with things I personally am good at. I suspect a lot of people would benefit from some sort of maths classes that actually met them where they were and tried to show them how mathematics works rather than just trying to force them to learn it by rote, as many people seem quite insecure about their mathematical ability.
I often notice this in other people with writing, though I think often the problem there is that they’ve been taught to write in a way they know on some level isn’t good, and don’t feel like they’re allowed to write in a better way (this is why I often recommend people improve their writing by just cutting out all the bits they find boring to write. This isn’t always the right advice, but if you’re struggling to write enough it probably is).
The endless grind of self improvement
Have you noticed how everyone has got really into cleaning and self improvement over the course of the pandemic?
I think it’s because these are the things that are within our locus of control when we can’t really go out and have fun and can’t see other people. We can still work on ourselves and our homes.
The problem is that we’ve been doing this for a year and a half and are long past the point where it’s become boring. As a result, it very much seems to have tapered off this year.
Unfortunately on top of that it’s been going on for so long at this point that it feels like I’ve become boring alongside it.
This seems like a common affliction, not just specific to me, but I’m not quite sure what the way out of it is. It’s clearly rooted in a lack of access to people, but I don’t think it’s just that (and persists even when I see people). It seems more like an increasingly atrophied sense of fun.
I wonder if this is a sign that we’re doing self improvement wrong. Putting the above two things together, maybe we can’t really do effective self-improvement unless we’re having fun with it?
Certainly I find that there’s a whole bunch of stuff that I want to have done and don’t want to do (e.g. plenty of introspection exercises I could be doing and reliably am not). Maybe the reason is that they are, like maths class and singing exercises, stupid and boring.
I don’t think we can get away with only doing fun things, but perhaps we need more ways to take joy in living our lives better? We still need to do the less fun parts, but we need the fun parts to motivate them.
Postscript
The header image for this piece is Playing in the Nuba mountains, by wikimedia user Marco Gualazzini.
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