Articles
Reversing into learner's mindset
hopefully for more than just guitar
“Limitation breeds creativity”.
I grew up hearing this quote, but didn’t really internalize it till fairly recently. I’ve been playing guitar for the better part of 16 years, but I’ve felt stuck in a rut for the last oh-so-many years. Sure, I can play and pick up new things fairly quickly, but a lot of time passes in between having really good practice sessions, jams, or simply getting in the ‘flow’.
I’m pretty sure a lot of people have had experiences similar to this, and we know that the Dunning-Kruger effect exists. What I want to tackle here is the importance of getting in the learners mindset again, which includes a lot of listening-to-other-people and un-learning. For experienced people, I think it’s one of those crucial things that we know is super important. We acknowledge it, but often fail on the follow-through. I want to explore that gap a bit more here.
I think a part of why this happens is when people who kind-of-know what they are doing think they know better, or it just doesn’t feel novel/new/fun anymore, and all of it adds to the feelings of “oh, I already know this”, or “this isn’t very different from what I am already doing” or “this feels boring and slow” etc. We may look at it from every lens, apart from the learner’s, where everything is new. It’s very easy to extrapolate, and quite often you end up with where you started.
What would really pay dividends here is to just try and limit the scope of everything that you know to the scope of a beginner.
Incidentally, what really put this into perspective for me was taking lessons for something very much out of my comfort zone. (In this case, ballroom dancing) I recall paying a lot of money just to learn really basic things, and being quite annoyed that I had to do the same steps over and over.. but over time, I realised that it was the repetition that made all the difference. You can learn the extent of all possible steps in a relatively short amount of time.. but ingraining them so that it becomes second nature, and getting the confidence to use them properly is what makes all the difference.
Relating this to what I wrote about a couple of years ago about life and pumping lemma , this sort of relates to the part of pumping, where you’d do the same thing over and over, and the novelty is pretty much gone. I would argue that this is what builds confidence, muscle memory and gives you something really solid to fall back on. When you take on too many new things, not spend a lot of time pumping, you may not end up feeling confident with how things stack up at the end. On the other hand, if it’s a limited scope, with a lot of time spent doing it over and over, it would definitely stay longer with you.
There’s this famous quote that really puts ammortizing things into perspective for me: “People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year, and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years”.
So yeah, I guess the crux of what I really want to say is to get out of the rut, it’s really important to embrace the learner’s mindset, and actually do the reps. More intention, and better discipline, that’s where it’s at.
I’ll end this here with this periodic reminder: