How to Teach Yourself to Do Difficult Things
Practice (supposedly) leads to excellence, but who among us has never spent hours practicing something that we haven’t even gotten close to? For example, I played A LOT of tennis as a teenager and fought the clarinet for many years in many bands, and you know what? In both cases, I was always average.
It’s a shame that software developer David McIver “A Completely Common System for Learning Difficult Things ” couldn’t help me back then. He created this step-by-step system to help us learn how to do complex things. Difficulty can be anything from learning to play chess to running a marathon; it doesn’t really matter what we talk about. He explains his process like this:
The system “always” works in the sense that “in the end” you either find out why the goal is not achievable for you, or you will succeed, but in the end it is a useless kind when there is no guarantee that it will not lead to success. infinitely long time. The more likely outcome is that you will either achieve success relatively quickly or get bored and give up, but that’s okay – the system is designed in such a way that you will benefit from following it every step of the way, even if you don’t reach your goals. goals. final goal.
So this is not a guarantee, but rather a structured plan to follow if you don’t know how to start mastering hard. He suggests two approaches: one process if you already know what success looks like, and one process if the definition of “success” is more subjective. In both cases, you follow these steps:
1. Find what it is like a tough thing, but easy.
2. Change the easy thing so that it looks like a difficult thing only in the sense that you find difficult.
3. Do the modified thing until it is no longer difficult.
4. If you get stuck, do one of the following:
- Go back to step 3 and choose another solution to the problem.
- Recursively apply a common system to learn how to do complex things with what you’re stuck on.
- Ask an expert or a rubber duck for advice.
- If you are still stuck after the first three tries, you may have reached some natural limit of difficulty and will not be able to make progress.
5. If the original challenge is now easy, you’re done. If not, go back to step 2.
The idea is that instead of focusing on improving everything at once, you can isolate the problem and, piece by piece, tackle the difficult aspects.
Or you find it too difficult for you, but hey, at least you tried.