[HN Gopher] The Mental Benefits of Being Terrible at Something
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The Mental Benefits of Being Terrible at Something
Author : danboarder
Score : 134 points
Date : 2021-05-19 04:02 UTC (18 hours ago)
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| colordrops wrote:
| Being very bad at something means that you will work through it
| without ego. You haven't yet attached your self worth to the
| thing, so you don't care how you are perceived at doing the
| thing.
|
| I struggled so much studying computer science in college just
| because I was afraid of looking like I didn't know something,
| instead of realizing that I was supposed to not know these things
| because I never encountered them before.
|
| I took some biology courses for fun, and easily got the top
| grades in the class because I had no attachment to the result or
| subject matter.
| tayo42 wrote:
| This is interesting because I feel the exact opposite is true.
| I suck at most things that I guess aren't really my regular
| hobbies. I also don't feel a need to try hard at them. Like I
| just skateboard for fun, its not a thing I really identify
| with, I'm definitely not progressing much at it. The things I
| do regularly, like if you asked me "what do you do" I work
| harder at it, it sucks to suck at the things you like to do.
| That's motivation for me. I guess I'm surprised in the case of
| your computer science you wouldn't find that motivating
| colordrops wrote:
| This was 25 years ago. I've long ago made the shift more to
| your line of thinking and motivation.
| b3morales wrote:
| > When you become a beginner, you are, as much as anything,
| training your curiosity--and the related trait of openness to
| experience.
|
| Are the Big 5 traits something you can actually train on? I've
| never seen anything to indicate that. I thought they were
| considered inherent. Would love more info if I have it wrong.
| abhinav22 wrote:
| Be bad at things you don't want to do. Be good at things you want
| to do.
|
| That way people don't typecast you into roles you don't want to
| do and typecast you to roles you do want to do.
|
| (This is in the workplace).
|
| Wish I learnt this earlier!
| amelius wrote:
| Probably similar to the mental benefits of being the underdog.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I really enjoyed this article. It reflects my experience.
|
| I used to have a teacher that would say "Any day I don't learn
| anything new, is a day that I died."
|
| I've always been good at picking up new stuff, and understanding
| difficult concepts, but these days, I have made a conscious
| decision to do one thing, and do it as well as possible. I'm
| probably at 90%. I'm fully aware that I'll never be 100%.
|
| That makes it fun. I like challenges.
| motohagiography wrote:
| The big difference is when you learn something as a kid, you
| "become," something, where as an adult, it's just another thing
| you do, at least until you have spent more of your life doing it
| than not, and few, if anyone, remember a time when you didn't.
|
| This is a skill I've developed, and it's as difficult as
| anything. I've been taking lessons from masters at things for the
| last decade and more, and the ability to become a student as an
| adult is very liberating, even if the freedom has difficult
| moments.
|
| The professional benefits have also been huge, since being able
| to bring real confidence to situations where you are not an
| expert is a significant leadership trait. The confidence comes
| from knowing your own boundaries and being able to recognize
| expertise in others and use it instead of trying to emmulate it.
| You can also recognize skill much faster.
|
| Imagine learning to read music as an adult and asking what the
| names of the strings are, what the dots on the page mean, why it
| doesn't resemble this other thing you think you know about, and
| why your skill in one area doesn't import into this one. The only
| path forward is work and practice. I'd imagine learning to speak
| a new language would be similar, where your skill level is
| beneath that of children.
|
| The key is to do say, "I am going to suck at this until I suck
| less at it." and then the huge piece is forgiving yourself the
| natural conceits that your adult mind/ego puts in your way, after
| recognizing them. To become a student means to accept
| vulnerability, sometimes humilitation, even shame for the things
| you do wrong when you realize why you do them, and then deal with
| them in the psychological present instead of as just being a kid
| who grows out of it.
|
| You can expect it to take 5-10 years to get as good or better
| than most of the kids who did something growing up. Having that
| horizon in mind is useful because it makes the present less
| urgent. Start it for the challenge, but finish it for the
| pleasure.
| p00dles wrote:
| +1 to challenge of learning a language as an adult. I feel that
| once you get older, you aren't in as many situations where you
| don't know what you're doing. Partially because it sucks to not
| know what you're doing, so you avoid those situations, and
| partially because you simply get better at the things that you
| do over time.
|
| It's been helpful for me to remember that for every expert,
| there was a time when they were the same level as you are.
| domano wrote:
| I enjoy doing things i am unexperienced or bad in, since this
| removes a lot of expectations people have and i am generally a
| fast learner.
|
| Actually doing stuff i am good at stresses me out sometimes!
| Maybe imposter syndrome or my fear of it actually being Dunning-
| Krueger :)
| chousuke wrote:
| I'm envious of people who are good at being bad. It's a skill
| that lets you choose how to develop yourself.
|
| I've noticed that it's really difficult for me to be bad at
| something, by which I mean that of my brain hasn't decided that
| it _really_ needs to keep doing something, I gravitate towards
| things that I 'm already decent at even if I don't really feel
| like I enjoy it.
|
| Doing even things that I might initially enjoy quickly becomes
| extremely stressful if I can't observe myself making progress.
| Forcing things works for a while, but is not sustainable.
|
| Sometimes there's also this weird disconnect between what _I_
| want to work on and the things my unconscious brain wants to work
| on, and that does get stressful as well.
| jfoutz wrote:
| Try cooking. The skill cap is high, it doesn't take much to
| make things OK, and you gotta eat.
|
| it has helped me a lot. Plenty of times I don't want to do it,
| but it's hard to put off for long. You can screw up a lot, and
| the results are still edible.
|
| Every damn meal I make has problems. Usually it's pretty good,
| but there are things I can do better with the output and the
| process. No matter the outcome, I feel better after eating. I'd
| suggest keeping a small stock of premade stuff on hand. a stack
| of crackers and some soup. Sometimes I just can't get it
| together.
| silvestrov wrote:
| Cooking is one thing I'm terrible at: there is no feedback
| loop at all. No matter how much time I spend on
| 'experimenting', I don't get any better.
|
| Many people simple cannot fathom this. They deny the existing
| of any such possibility.
| pjerem wrote:
| Tasting what you cook while you cook is an incr/edible/
| feedback loop
| jpraamstra wrote:
| Exactly, it doesn't get much clearer than this whether
| you failed or succeeded!
|
| @silvestrov: just try easy recipes and buy good and fresh
| ingredients, and continue with harder recipes once you
| get the hang of it.
| username90 wrote:
| Only if you have a good sense of how things should taste
| and intuition for how what you put in affected it.
| wildmanx wrote:
| And how it should taste at this stage of the process. It
| needs experience to try some dough and extrapolate from
| it how the cake/bread/... will taste after baking it.
| Same with many sauces, for example. Things change when
| mixed with pasta, potatoes, veggies, meat. A sauce is
| much stronger without them. If you taste it and are
| inexperienced you may think "just right" and the dish
| will end up terribly bland.
| fao_ wrote:
| Right, so you correct that for next time? It's an
| iterative process, and like any skill -- it takes time.
| jpraamstra wrote:
| Not necessarily true. Taste is super subjective, only you
| can decide whether you think something tastes good.
|
| And of course, it takes a long time to taste something
| and realize exactly what it misses or what causes it to
| taste good, but as long as you are able to test out
| different recipes you'll eventually end up with quite a
| few dishes that taste great.
| username90 wrote:
| The point was plateauing, not that what you make doesn't
| taste great to you. Making stuff that tastes great to an
| average person isn't hard, you'll reach there really
| quickly, it is improving after that point that is hard.
| spuz wrote:
| These things are not innate, they are learnt. You are
| essentially saying you can only learn to cook if you
| already know how to cook. Obviously this is not true
| otherwise no one would ever learn to cook.
|
| To develop the intuition for flavour and quantities you
| have to be willing to ruin your food. Add too much salt
| and you'll find out pretty quick. You'll also learn
| pretty quickly that the "right" amount is somewhere
| between too little and too much.
| gadders wrote:
| Yes, my wife can do this. I think most people could learn
| the technical skills, but my wife can taste something and
| decide on exactly the right thing to add.
| jfoutz wrote:
| it's a skill. get a book, take a class. I made the same
| eggs on the same pan for a long time. Do the same thing
| over and over. Treat it as a hobby, not an obligation. It
| really is something you can get better at. You'll learn how
| heat transfers over time. Furthermore, your gear is
| different. It has it's own special set of tolerances so no
| one can give precise instructions, because your tools are
| different.
|
| I've burned soup. I believe you, it can be super hard.
| There is a feedback loop, you're maybe not seeing it yet.
| Look at all the things, try lower temperatures, let things
| take longer.
|
| Experimenting is a later skill. Follow the recipe as well
| as you can, and observe the outcome. I want to say you'll
| know where the errors are, but that's not realistic. Maybe
| your oven is poorly calibrated. Maybe it's too hot for too
| long. or not hot enough.
|
| The main point is, this is a place you can try and fail,
| and try again tomorrow. If you don't like the product,
| figure out why it's bad and fix it. Lots of room to try
| stuff out, and even if you're vaguely close, you get food.
| For me, eating changes my mental state. even if the food
| isn't good, it has this weird effect of ending hunger.
|
| You do you. If cooking is too hard, don't do it. But kinda
| the point is; try, fail try, fail, try ok, try good. You
| can figure it out. 7 billion other people did, you can too.
| timwaagh wrote:
| Well if you know to do stuff like bake an egg there's are
| numerous recipes out there on YouTube & the rest of the web
| that are superior to what ~80% of people make.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Mine is bicycling. To me, a bicycle is a device built to
| convey me a short distance before humiliating and injuring
| me. I am comically bad at it, capable of flinging myself
| into unseen ditches and then having the bicycle land on
| _top_ of me in a painful manner. Since childhood, I
| essentially look like one of those self-evolved neural net
| programs trying to propagate some kind of "vehicle" of
| randomly distributed wheels across a terrain: flailing,
| flipping upside down at the tiniest bump, hopelessly mal-
| adapted for the task.
| jmnicolas wrote:
| > Many people simple cannot fathom this. They deny the
| existing of any such possibility.
|
| Frankly I never thought about it before since I self
| learned cooking quite easily. Maybe it's my French
| genetics? ;)
|
| I thought cooking was easy, pastry on another hand requires
| much more dedication and precision, I would say it's the
| last 20% of cooking.
| pmg102 wrote:
| Absolutely the same. Some people just naturally improve
| when iterating on something (for me, coding is this way)
| while other just stay at "incompetent" forever - for me,
| most other activities such as DIY, playing guitar, cooking,
| and so on.
|
| I always fail to remember this when getting frustrated at
| programmers who don't seem to improve
| munificent wrote:
| _> Some people just naturally improve when iterating on
| something_
|
| I don't know if framing it as "natural" is super helpful.
| I think you're right that some people stumble onto the
| right feedback loops for some activities. But that
| doesn't mean that the feedback is unattainable for
| others. You may have to hunt around, but it's still
| there. And once you find it, you can make progress on the
| skill.
|
| My experience is that the most important tool that
| affects your success at building some skill is _being
| mindful of your narrative around it and how it relates to
| your identity_.
|
| Humans naturally pick and fixate on identities. Once we
| feel an attribute is true about ourselves, we tend to
| choose behavior that reinforce that attribute _even if it
| 's an identity we don't like._ If you define yourself as
| someone who is incompetent forever at cooking, then you
| will naturally overlook or avoid actions and input that
| doesn't confirm that.
|
| You won't cook as often. When you do cook, you won't pay
| as much attention to the process or results. You won't
| remember the details of what you did last time (since it
| was such an unpleasant experience that you shut out the
| entire memory) and how it differs this time. Without that
| stuff, there's no way to actually get better.
|
| But if you define yourself as, say, "someone who is not
| naturally gifted at cooking but wants to learn and is
| perserverant", you may find it to be a more attainable
| goal.
| jonesnc wrote:
| I think this highlights the difference between practice
| and _good_ practice. You won 't get better at something
| by merely doing it over and over again. You have to
| practice something difficult or foundational to the skill
| with intention, using techniques that are designed to
| help you improve your skills.
|
| For example, if you're trying to get better at playing
| drums, playing the same beat poorly for an hour probably
| won't do much. A technique like starting to play at a
| slow tempo and gradually speeding up, cleaning up the
| mistakes as you go, is a technique that can help you
| practice more effectively.
|
| The same is true for programming. Implementing a simple
| TODO app, while a good intro problem to solve for
| beginners, is probably not going to make most programmers
| better or more knowledgable at programming.
| watwut wrote:
| Because all of those require level of knowledge that is
| hard to acquire without external resources. You wont get
| better just iterating.
| heisenzombie wrote:
| I think there is a lot of implicit knowledge and skill in
| even "basic" cooking that people tend to massively
| undervalue. Anyone who tells a beginner cook to
| "experiment" is falling for this. Beginners should copy, as
| fastidiously as they can!
| danmur wrote:
| Yeah, experimenting is the worst thing to do until you've
| mastered a few things like temperature, fats, amount of
| liquid etc. I made so many horrible experiments.
| taneq wrote:
| Eat the food you cook?
| fao_ wrote:
| > there is no feedback loop at all.
|
| Smell the spices before you try them out, use small amounts
| then taste the food while it's cooking. This works for
| almost anything that isn't baked. Google to find out what
| spices intensify through cooking (Fenugreek, Cayenne
| Pepper, etc.)
|
| Also check out The Food Lab's book for information on what
| different things do, so you can construct a mental model of
| it.
| benohear wrote:
| Buy a pan without a non-stick coating (eg stainless steel
| or enameled cast iron) and try and fry as much as you can
| in it.
|
| The feedback is straightforward: If your food sticks,
| you've messed up. It teaches you loads about the right
| amount of heat and patience.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Are you experimenting with many dishes at once? Pick one
| you like, cook it once a week (or whatever your boredom
| tolerance is), and experiment with that. Try throwing in
| alternative spices or ingredients, varying salt amounts,
| cooking times, etc.
|
| IMO, cooking is best learned one or two dishes at a time.
| After some experience, you'll start to get a broader
| picture of the art. Think of it like trying to learn
| "music" from scratch by picking up a different instrument
| each night - it could work eventually, but you're probably
| make better progress with a little focus.
| imagica wrote:
| The secret to cooking is to test the food and know some
| basic things which may seem awkward at first but are simply
| learnable. Everybody who started cooking had a moment when
| they didn't know what they were doing and a lot of practice
| made them good. As a beginner I would concentrate on a few
| dishes and get good at those then slowly progress to more
| xavriley wrote:
| I found my cooking improved massively when I focussed on
| more scientific methods. For me personally The Food Lab and
| Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat were both great. Reducing the
| variables to a couple of axes made it much easier to decide
| what to add or change to get a result. For example if a
| sauce tastes too greasy, add the appropriate acid to
| lighten things up
| LegitShady wrote:
| Pick a recipe you want to learn.
|
| Do it ~3 times as the recipe states. sometimes I even do it
| 3 days in a row.
|
| After that, write it up based on what you learned that you
| fixed between each attempt. After that, try making some
| changes. Note - if you're baking don't experiment too much
| especially as a beginner, but if you're making cinammon
| rolls you can experiment with the filling much more than
| the dough, or you can find dozens of different kinds of
| dough recipes for cinnamon buns.
|
| There is a lot to learn when cooking, but there are a ton
| of resources online (youtube and otherwise). You need to
| actively be trying to get better to get better at most
| things, I've found, unless you're doing it for 8 hours a
| day at which point you kind of have to become better just
| by time spent.
| klyrs wrote:
| I didn't start experimenting for about the first decade
| after I started cooking. I followed recipes, and learned
| the basics. After you're feeling good about the outcome of
| a certain recipe, then comes time to tweak some parameters.
| Or, reframe what you consider "experimenting" to look like.
| Pick a dish you want to master, and find 10 recipes. Do
| each one (depending how much variety you want in life, this
| can take 10 days or 10 weeks). Take notes about what went
| right, what went wrong, what directions were unclear. Try
| and draw conclusions. That's an experiment! After that,
| maybe try and wing it, or mix&match parts of different
| recipes, to find what works for you.
| brailsafe wrote:
| I have the opposite problem. As soon as I become remotely
| competent at something, I have a hard time bringing myself to
| do it.
| vikiomega9 wrote:
| I have the same problem. Once I get some sense of
| understanding the overall skill or problem I lose interest?
| Novice skill is definitely a worse thing to have and getting
| better takes a lot of consistent work and time.
|
| How do I fix this? It seems like a motivation problem,
| possibly some sort of craving for novelty perhaps (I don't
| want to say ADHD but sounds like it)?
| brailsafe wrote:
| ADHD for me. It became such a problem that I saught help
| from the nurse practitioner at my Uni and got a diagnosis
| (at 27)
| vikiomega9 wrote:
| What techniques do you use now to cope? I'm going to go
| get a diagnosis as well, I think I have enough anecdotal
| evidence to talk to a medical professional.
| username90 wrote:
| You can fix that by raising the bar for which you feel you
| are "remotely competent". If you consider anyone below world
| class to not be remotely competent then you'll be world class
| before you give up.
| medstrom wrote:
| Alternatively, keep piling on new ways of doing something,
| like raising the difficulty slider in a video game to keep
| it challenging.
| [deleted]
| stevekemp wrote:
| I can appreciate that. I can often be a perfectionist in some
| things, and when I can see I'm doing badly I get unhappy.
|
| That said I started attending a pottery-class at local school a
| couple of years ago. Objectively almost everything I've made
| has been terrible. And yet? I'm drinking coffee out of a mug I
| made myself, and that feels pretty good.
|
| It's unusual for me to both recognize that I'm "bad", and yet
| still want to go back. But definitely true in this case.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Eating food out of bowls I made 10 years ago makes me really
| happy.
|
| It was also extremely satisfying over a few years of off and
| on spinning to gain the vocabulary to describe why my work
| was bad. Making 1-2 beautiful (but still flawed) dishes was
| worth hundreds of mediocre projects.
| mjburgess wrote:
| It could be helpful to list things that you do,
| unprejudicially, and see if _all_ of them are like this.
|
| You might find that actually, in some things, you don't mind
| "just playing". But those things are, probably, unlike anything
| else many others call "play".
|
| I suspect that you do play for its own sake, its just in areas
| you havent considered in that light.
| fibonachos wrote:
| This plus the anxiety of thinking you are bad at everything
| despite evidence to the contrary.
| chousuke wrote:
| I think part of that is the fact that the better you become
| at something, the better you are at recognizing how much you
| don't know; and I think that that skill generalizes, so over
| time you can get overwhelmed trying new things because you
| can "instantly" see how much you're missing, especially if
| you have no transferrable skills that apply.
| gnomespaceship wrote:
| I definitely get this with speaking foreign languages -
| English feels like a second mother tongue to me at this
| point, but even though I can create Spanish sentences, I
| get choked up when about to speak.
| metters wrote:
| I suck at karaoke, but it is so much fun. Even more because I am
| so bad at singing. My friends usually cannot stop laughing when
| my voice starts to break. It would be enjoyable too with a good
| voice I guess, but I do not wanna miss the times we had fun
| singing with my poor voice
| laurieg wrote:
| There's nothing more awkward than 1 good singer surrounded by
| bad singers at a karaoke box. It's amazing how they can
| completely nail a song and put everyone off singing.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The whole point of karaoke is being bad at it!
| euroderf wrote:
| There is a very persuasive argument that karaoke is totally
| punk rock. No requirement to be especially competent; just
| bring the desire.
| rkachowski wrote:
| karaoke really clicked for me when I really embraced the fact
| there is no way to win. It's not about making people laugh or
| singing perfectly or impressing people, it's literally just
| cutting loose and enjoying yourself.
| drewcoo wrote:
| That's not about the benefits of being terrible. It's about the
| benefits of improving and mastering skills.
|
| Some things I'd rather just enjoy being terrible at. I make bad
| art badly, for instance, with no self-pressure to even attempt to
| be good. And no desire to consult a life coach to see if I'm
| doing "wrong" right. It's cathartic!
| danboarder wrote:
| @drewcoo I hear you, I did get this concept from the article
| too, with the example of a young child that is happy to try new
| things and just enjoy it. I think the improvement and learning
| or getting good at things is a side effect. Beyond just having
| fun doing new things, mastering new things can be an entirely
| different pursuit with it's own rewards but perhaps takes a lot
| longer (the "10,000 hour rule" concept that Malcolm Gladwell
| writes about in his book Outliers
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_%28book%29 ).
| p00dles wrote:
| If you're interested, David Epstein wrote a book called
| "Range" that provides an alternate viewpoint to the 10,000
| hour rule. I found Epstein's model resonated more for me than
| the 10k rule.
|
| https://davidepstein.com/the-range/
| tayo42 wrote:
| > particularly in these times of change and disorder, openness to
| experience is also a good way to prevent anxiety.
|
| I thought this was a weird conclusion. I think of my self as
| pretty open to experience (maybe there's a unintuitive definition
| for this I'm unaware of?) But that is a conclusion I don't really
| relate to. I guess I'm open to new things but quite so "go with
| the flow". Seems contradictory out loud but I can't be the only
| person who feels that way.
|
| Also, I feel like this article seems to suggest mastery is
| achievable if you just work hard enough. My life experience with
| my own attempts to master things suggests otherwise. I don't know
| if everyone has it in them to actual master something.
| giu wrote:
| I think openness to experience is only one part of the
| equation. There are other parts, e.g., what are your goals? How
| do you deal with your emotional state if the experience doesn't
| go your way? And many more. It's quite complex.
|
| There is a treatment called exposure therapy [0] which actually
| is used to threat anxiety and for one helps with emotional
| processing.
|
| [0] https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/patients-and-
| families/exp...
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