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The Mental Benefits of Being Terrible at Something

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Re: The Mental Benefits of Being Terrible at Something

#51

Post by colordrops »

tayo42 wrote: post #14
colordrops wrote: post #10

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 befor…

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 t…

This was 25 years ago. I've long ago made the shift more to your line of thinking and motivation.

Re: The Mental Benefits of Being Terrible at Something

#52

Post by spuz »

username90 wrote: post #25
pjerem wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tasting what you cook while you cook is an incr/edible/ feedback loop

Only if you have a good sense of how things should taste and intuition for how what you put in affected it.

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.

Re: The Mental Benefits of Being Terrible at Something

#53

Post by stevekemp »

chousuke wrote: post #3

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 q…

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.

Re: The Mental Benefits of Being Terrible at Something

#55

Post by b3morales »

> 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.

Re: The Mental Benefits of Being Terrible at Something

#56

Post by LegitShady »

silvestrov wrote: post #22
jfoutz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: The Mental Benefits of Being Terrible at Something

#57

Post by munificent »

pmg102 wrote: post #31
silvestrov wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

> 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.

Re: The Mental Benefits of Being Terrible at Something

#58

Post by vikiomega9 »

brailsafe wrote: post #6
chousuke wrote: post #3

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 q…

I have the opposite problem. As soon as I become remotely competent at something, I have a hard time bringing myself to do it.

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)?

Re: The Mental Benefits of Being Terrible at Something

#59

Post by datadrivenangel »

stevekemp wrote: post #53
chousuke wrote: post #3

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 q…

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 wan…

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.

Re: The Mental Benefits of Being Terrible at Something

#60

Post by klyrs »

silvestrov wrote: post #22
jfoutz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.
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