Stages of Learning

By Jonathan Lam on 08/24/17

Tagged: brain-dump

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At the beginning, everything is a success. Even when you're learning by repetition of models. Every little steps deserves some appreciation or other reward.

After the beginning, you begin to see the true difficulty of everything in the trade. There are some ideas and skills that you've encountered that have been either much simpler or more complex than originally thought. All the while, all of the skills get much easier.

At the end, nothing is a success. Everything is criticism; when you see an error you made, fixing it just gets it back to the norm. Nothing is too difficult to accomplish; everything is within the spectrum.

—

I felt like writing this because of its relevance to adolescence. Everything is so new, is about learning, and skills move to muscle-memory before we even know it! I think it's worthwhile to remember some of these hardships.

Working at my aunt's bakery and having to (trying to) converse with customers in three Chinese dialects is one of these learning moments. Starting the week with barely-conversational Chinese, we ended the week with that and the names of assorted Chinese bakery products. Blindfolded Rubik's cubing or one-handed cubing are other challenges, albeit more exciting. And driving is another one of these, and it still scares me how life-threatening it can be, especially with the high rates of DUI cases where I live. Relearning typing or writing too is a very difficult task: I've tried to train myself to type with the supposedly-more-efficient Dvorak-layout keyboard and write with my left hand, and only now do I realize why my handwriting has never been so exact. If only I had tried harder in pre-K…

And they've all gotten easier, and they're all still getting easier, and I guess they will continue to do so until I get so used to them that they become second nature like walking or running or talking or writing or test-taking or eating or any of the other skills I forgot it was difficult to do.