I like this thought, it resonates a lot with my experiences learning the cello over 25 years. Definitely a lot of things that seemed impossible when I saw/heard them as a kid, that it’s obvious how to do now. From which I infer that competence pretty much always feels from the inside like it being obvious how to do something/having to pretty much intend to not do it, to wind up not doing it—aka the accomplishment of X becoming a matter of steering rather than capabilities/prediction once the capabilities are there.
One other takeaway I have from learning the instrument is just that it didn’t seem obvious to me that being able to play the things I can now play, wouldn’t in fact turn out to be impossible before I tried working at it a lot. Like in retrospect I feel like I can say “oh yeah, there were some obvious feeling of traction/There’s Something Here, small pieces I actually did learn, etc.”…but also like man did I spend some time being discouraged before I had a good model of what it was to work at something a lot for a long time and get gradually but continuously better at it. Which, I feel like the cello playing is just sort of the reason I’m aware of that being a thing at all, at the level of any sort of credibility beyond just “yeah I guess people work at things and get better at them.”
Like my guess is since I did it with that, if it hadn‘t been that if would have been something else since probably wanting to do that with something is a durable feature of my personality (and I‘d had past interests in things). But on some level it still feels like actually had to actually start digging to not have a concept-shaped hole around some both object and meta level heuristics that were there. Ie. I basically spent the first 13 of those 25 years not working hard enough, and it seems like maybe a significant part of that was not having had the future world in which I both did that and it paid off, feel credibly real/realistic (part of me wonders how much this may be related to a measured visual-spatial deficit—“futures being harder to visualize” sort of deal.)
Definitely did the hero licensing thing early on and one of the parts of teaching that feels really rewarding now is being able to point at that (other/related potholes) and say “Look there! That is obviously a pothole, which there is no reason to step in!”
I like this thought, it resonates a lot with my experiences learning the cello over 25 years. Definitely a lot of things that seemed impossible when I saw/heard them as a kid, that it’s obvious how to do now. From which I infer that competence pretty much always feels from the inside like it being obvious how to do something/having to pretty much intend to not do it, to wind up not doing it—aka the accomplishment of X becoming a matter of steering rather than capabilities/prediction once the capabilities are there.
One other takeaway I have from learning the instrument is just that it didn’t seem obvious to me that being able to play the things I can now play, wouldn’t in fact turn out to be impossible before I tried working at it a lot. Like in retrospect I feel like I can say “oh yeah, there were some obvious feeling of traction/There’s Something Here, small pieces I actually did learn, etc.”…but also like man did I spend some time being discouraged before I had a good model of what it was to work at something a lot for a long time and get gradually but continuously better at it. Which, I feel like the cello playing is just sort of the reason I’m aware of that being a thing at all, at the level of any sort of credibility beyond just “yeah I guess people work at things and get better at them.”
Like my guess is since I did it with that, if it hadn‘t been that if would have been something else since probably wanting to do that with something is a durable feature of my personality (and I‘d had past interests in things). But on some level it still feels like actually had to actually start digging to not have a concept-shaped hole around some both object and meta level heuristics that were there. Ie. I basically spent the first 13 of those 25 years not working hard enough, and it seems like maybe a significant part of that was not having had the future world in which I both did that and it paid off, feel credibly real/realistic (part of me wonders how much this may be related to a measured visual-spatial deficit—“futures being harder to visualize” sort of deal.)
Definitely did the hero licensing thing early on and one of the parts of teaching that feels really rewarding now is being able to point at that (other/related potholes) and say “Look there! That is obviously a pothole, which there is no reason to step in!”