Mind the Beginner

Have you ever tried to deliberately mess something up? It’s hard to make it look convincing isn’t it? It’s impossible to create an genuine mess when you know how not to mess up.

But looking at “how to mess up” isn’t what we are after, we’re always looking for ways not to mess things up obviously. The internet is overloaded with “how-to’s” to take your hand and guide you through all the steps and help you not to mess up. It’s all very nice obviously, but it doesn’t focus on what it is that makes you fail.

Why you fail

Did you ever stop and think about why you fail at something? Why it’s not the best you can do? If something is the best you can do but it’s not good enough, is it still a failure? That’s up to you, but  would it be the same kind of failure if you didn’t give it all you have to give and so failed. Knowing full well that if you gave everything you’d succeed.

If you’re just not good enough, you’ll just have to get better. And that’s not what this blogpost is about. This blogpost is about failing where you could (should?) have succeeded just because you didn’t give it your best.

A few questions for the conscience

Look back at your resent failures, yes it’s painful but it’s for the greater good here. Did you fail because of not being good enough or because you were slacking. With those failures you were slacking on, can you recall working on the project? I’m going to make a few guesses here:

• You weren’t focused
• or worse.. you were multitasking *shudders*
• and you weren’t spending enough time on the project

I know, I know, it’s almost as if I was there with you and have seen what you were doing. There are two problems here, the time spent and the focus.

Spending enough time

Taking just 20 minutes to work on a task is certainly a good idea, but by itself it will do nothing for you. You’ll have to do more than just sit there and watch a timer as it counts down. Watching it will actually slow it down! Spending enough time has a lot to do with knowing what you actually want or need to do. As soon as you have a clear images of the goal, make an estimation on how long it will take. The first pit-fall presents itself: your estimation is off, maybe even by as much as 90%. Either you over exaggerate the time it takes (no wonder you’re reluctant to do it) or you thought it was far easier than it actually was  (no wonder you got in trouble at the deadline).

Focus

If you have read the four hour workweek you know the Pareto principle: 80% of the work gets done in 20% of the time. Great! So now you can cut down your estimation by 80%. Wrong again! The 80-20 principle when applied to work implies that the 20% of the time you spend on work you actually do the best you can. You focus on the task, no distractions whatsoever. No checking facebook, twitter or steeping a pot of tea. Petting your cat or answering the phone, although nice breaks aren’t to productive as well.

Giving it your best: combining focus and time

In the time you actually work on something, do just that and nothing else. You might find it hard to keep that focus but with some training in meditation it’s actually not that hard. Steeping some tea or brewing a cup of coffee will have to wait until you take a short break. For whatever length of time you are working, cut out all distractions and know exactly what it is you are working at. You can do it!

Fail to fail

If you spend enough time and focus on whatever it is you are doing, you-can-not-fail. It is now impossible for you to mess up. And if you do fail, you either, didn’t focus enough, didn’t spend enough time or spent your time focused on the wrong thing.

Now you know how not to fail, what are you waiting for?

What is the difference between failure and success? Or more accurately, what is the difference between learning and not learning? A very simple fact of life: You have to make mistakes in order to learn. But that isn’t where things start.

The first step in learning is actually getting of your behind and getting to it. In some cases you’ll have to get on your behind actually (like when you want to learn how to program a computer, desk-flying is the way to go.) but nevertheless, you need to act. Something I’ve been learning the hard way the last few days. For a quick background on that: I’m studying for a few exams and so I’m spending almost all my waking hours on it. Not to pass the exams (it’s important) but to learn more. To end each day knowing things I didn’t know when I woke up. (much more important)

Twenty minutes

By far the best way I know of to learn something is to completely focus on it for twenty minutes at a time. Set a timer and make write down what it is you want to have done in those twenty minutes. Start the timer and immerse yourself in what it is you want to learn. The timer goes off and you grab a quick cup of tea, perhaps some fresh air and after a short break (five minutes) you immerse yourself again for 20 minutes. Spend the first few minutes reviewing what you did in the previous block and then continue with the new things.

Studying this way  you can learn anything you want. Yes it takes some time but that’s common knowledge by now, getting something for nothing is exceedingly rare. You’ll just have to come to terms with it: if you want something you’ll have to work for it.

Twenty minutes, isn’t that a very long time to focus on something? Once you get going, the twenty minutes fly by and the timer will startle you. Seriously, time flies when you’re having fun. And if you’re a bit like me, learning something new is fun and you’re always looking to learn more. Every day brings new opportunity to learn stuff and to go to bed just a bit wiser than when you got up this morning.

Cutting down time

Now we go back to success and failure. What is the difference? It’s time spent on trying to be successful. Nothing more then that! The more time you spend learning how to be successful the more you will learn how to be a failure. In time you’ll learn every single pitfall that is stopping you and you can easily navigate around them. Success!

You’re already and expert with life but I’m sure you want to be an expert in other things too. But here’s another hard truth for you: you only have so many “10,000 hours” in a lifetime to spend. Now if we apply the 80/20 principle that Tim Ferris made popular to that you can become  really really good at something in 2,000 hours. But we can cut that down even further. Learning the basics of something takes far less than that.

If you want only the barebone basics of programming in c++ for instance. That can be done in 160 hours or less. (That’s what my University expects at least, the course Programming 101 is “worth” 6 ECTS, and one ECTS is equivalent to 28 hours of investment). Like a lot of courses students somehow manage to complete the tasks and pass the exams while not investing nearly as much time as expected. Another cut in our hours to leave us with the final number: 100 hours for something as complex as computer programming. That’s 300 blocks of 20 minutes to learn the basics.

Basics

Becoming an expert isn’t all that hard, find a direction and head off into it. Keep going into that direction and you’ll soon be the expert. Teach others how to do the same and become rich. Doing it for them will be even more profitable. Conquering the basics in any field often is more than enough. Do you need to be able to dream html/css/xml to build a website? Of course not, look at this blog for instance. I have no experience with css or xml (yet) and very little html. But I’m running a blog, a successful one at that as well.

You can get a tune out of a guitar on just one string, or if you want something a bit more fancy, learn a power chord and you can slide that all over the neck. Add a distortion and you’ve got rock! 100 Hours of learning to play a guitar and you can join a rockband. That’s all it takes, and you’ll get better while in the band of course.

Ruling the world

Does every guitarist on stage have 10,000 hours spent? If they have now they sure didn’t when they started out in a band. Likewise a computer programmer is capable of producing good basic code within 100 hours. Ruling the world isn’t being an expert, it’s investing twenty minutes at a time learning something so every single day you go to bed wiser, better and smarter than when you got up that morning. Day in day out: keep learning and going to bed wiser and you will rule the world, twenty minutes at a time.

“The only stupid question is the one not asked.”

A huge problem with internet I’ve talked about before is that if people perceive you as an expert you are an expert. On one side of the coin this means that you can quite easily become an expert in just about any field out there. All it takes is knowing a bit more about something than others. It gets even more fun in real life. On the other side we have the danger of being perceived as an expert without being one. I’ll get back to that a bit further down.

Computer experts

Just this afternoon I walked into one of the terminal rooms of my faculty (the rooms where they keep the computers), a fellow student was sitting there looking very hard at some statistics. With a quick comment on how he was looking at his screen sparked a chat that lasted well over an hour. Now I can bluff my way out of most statistics things and I nodded from time to time. Although I do understand what they were about, I can’t recreate them.

The subject changed to things like SSH. And that is where I had a realisation. I actually have no idea at all what it’s for. Yes, it’s a secure shell. But what is secure, and what is shell. At that very moment I could do two things:

1. Bluff my way out of it and hope nobody would notice. After all, I’m an IT student, a perceived computer expert.
2. Confess that I had no idea what he was talking about.

Stupid questions

I started firing questions, quite simply because I no longer really care about what others think. I had questions and I wanted answers. The guy I was talking to seemed to know what he was talking about so that was a good place to start. He might not be an expert, but to me he was because he knew a bit more than I did. I got an answer to just about every question. Answers I could build upon. He spent more than an hour of his time explaining things.

Two students in a computer related education, one computer science and one information science. They both should know those basic things right? You shouldn’t be studying in this field if you have no clue how to do the simplest of things with a computer.
And right there is where the problems begin. People don’t ask questions in shame of now knowing.

Don’t be stupid

Had I not asked what SSH was I still wouldn’t know right now. There are a lot of things in “geek culture” for instance that everybody knows. Or at least it looks like they do. A random “42″ somewhere is sure to cause a few laughs. There are tons more of those acronyms and terms. BSOD, /dev/null, IRC, coffee++, Dvorak, the list is endless.
Now I know that there are several students who have no idea what these things mean. I used to be one of those actually. There are several ways to tackle such problems, gabs in your knowledge. You could look things up, and I recommend wikipedia for that. The quality of knowledge there is actually quite good. But the simpler approach – much faster too – is to ask what someone means. Becoming a google jockey also helps.

Shame

“Ask someone about something I should know?! Are you insane!” Yes my sanity can be questionable but that’s beside the point. Take my talk this afternoon for instance. The guy I was talking to knows more than me obviously. But because I’m a student in the IT sector, look the part and am a geek it’s an immediate assumption that I know the things I ended up asking.

There you have the other side of the coin I talked about at the beginning of this blogpost. Just by looking like an expert people project their ideas on what an expert should know onto you. It’s hard to break through that at times. The first few times I asked questions people would look rather strange as if I was joking. But now comes the great thing about my faculty: if you ask questions, no matter how basic people do not laugh.Now I know that’s not the same for every crowd you’re going to be in. But does laughter about a question say something about the one asking the question, or the ones laughing.

It’s not shameful not to know something. It’s the perfect beginning to learn. If you do not confess that you do not know, how will you ever learn? There is no shame in not knowing, there is only shame in not admitting to it and staying stupid. You are not a failure if you do not know. Got that?

If you do not know you are NOT a failure (you’re a failure if you don’t ask..!)

Do you every lie awake at night thinking about what you would wish for if you ever got three wishes granted? At some point in our childhood I’m sure we all have these thoughts. Some smart kids usually make sure to wish for more wishes. Others just end up with the cliche’s of “rich” and “famous”. A bit more creativity gets wishes like “speaking all the languages in the world” or “being able to play this or that instrument to perfection”

Some of these wishes are totally unrealistic, you can never hope to master every language nor can you master several martial arts. Unlimited wishes – or actually any wishes at all – are unrealistic.

Other wishes though are skills actual people do have. Take playing an instrument for example. To master is takes countless hours and that is where most people throw in the towel. We’re so used to getting things on a silver platter that having to work for something seems to cause an allergic reaction. So we drift off into another dream about wishes and what we would wish for.

What would you give to make those wishes come true? What would you be willing to actually physically do? Would you toil countless hours, read all there is to read and fall on your face time and time again because you didn’t quite get things right yet? No probably would not now would you, that’s why you wish for things to come to you the easy way.
But lets just be honest here, things very rarely come to us that way. Every single thing does take actual work to get. Talent is one thing, but without making proper work of it the talent will mean nothing.

You can wish for all the talent in the world and perhaps you even already have talent. What sets people apart though is the willingness to go the extra mile and work hard to develop that talent or perhaps work really really hard without talent just because they want to accomplish something.

How many wishes does it take to get where you want?

Zero

Because wishes are highly overrated. All it takes is countless hours of faceplanting. Do I hear you ask how many that should be? The answer to this one should be a constant “one more is always better” because you never know what that latest (greatest?) faceplant will teach you. Take a fall, take another one and after you dust yourself off hit the dust again for good measure. No wish will ever come true, at least none of those involving skill.

Does all this sound depressing? Lets turn things around a bit.

If aquiring a skill takes countless hours, but there are people on this planet with those skills that means those hours aren’t that countless. You’ve probably heard of the 10,000 hours idea stating that it takes that many hours to master something. All you have to do is make those hours and you will get the skill.

Now that’s a lot of hours so lets have another round of thinking: How many people really do invest all those hours? Just a few, it’s even safe to assume that investing just 1000 or 500 hours is somewhat rare. Invest 1000 hours (or should I say 1000 faceplants?) in the skill and you can be sure that you’ll be better in it than most.

Most of the skills we want, we want just so we can show them off. Faling flat on our face isn’t exactly showing-off material so we wish, and wish. Hoping the skills will come but the failure will not. Start showing off the failures and the skill will be there, its just the other side of the same coin.

Show the skills and you show the coin…

Failure is a part of every day life for without it we wouldn’t be learning at all. Failure is level zero so to speak, it’s where we start from, we have nothing, no achievements, no successes. From this starting point we embark on a journey to get where we want to be. Without exception this is “better”, “successful”, “loved” or perhaps “being worthy in the eyes of others”. (Nobody goes forth in life trying to be miserable after all, we all have our golden dreams.)In the eyes of others is a very important statement here for we usually want things not for ourselves but so we can show others that we really are somebody. If bragging about ourselves to others would not get us higher up some social ladder would we still do it just or ourselves?

The single biggest hurdle to get over is to accept that we are utter failures in life when we start out. We can’t even take care of ourselves now can we? Diaper changes, meals served to us and all kind of other things. We don’t have control over anything, not even our own body (yet). The more we learn, the more we gain control over our own actions. The more control we have to more responsibility this brings along with it. But you -as avid reader of this blog and other blogs on personal development and lifestyle design- already know this don’t you? They say knowledge is power and most certainly knowing that, with more control comes more responsibility equals more power. You’re in control of your own actions every single day. Again this is old news if you’ve been reading about personal development.

Acceptance

Accepting the current failure is the big hurdle, getting over it can be done by realizing that you have the control to change things. You’re not a victim of your own life or a victim of circumstance. With enough knowledge (power) you can change just about anything. It might not make you a millionair rock star, but you can have a very comfortable life if only you take control and not let life slip through your fingers. Life isn’t that bad actually once you get properly acquainted with the way the game is played

But still, I haven’t written anything you didn’t know already now did I? For you see, that’s the problem with all these development blogs. We keep beating about the bush on that one issue that seems so hard to grasp: You are responsible and so it’s up to you to make the change.

Same old stuff, different day

We bloggers can write all we want and you can read every single blog out there on the subject. Fact is that reading is not the same as actually taking responsibility. I could write all I want about the major changes in my life, how I made the changes and how I’m on my path to where I want to be. Many bloggers do the same and their posts are always a great hit with the readers. Reading about how we live our lives and how we do things might give you some ideas, but reading alone will not change your life. Taking (blog-inspired) action is where the control is. Even if you do manage to take control failure will always be a part of the game of life, it’s here to stay.

I know I really enjoy reading about others traveling, about Leo planning to move to San Francisco, Alan’s latest adventures, Carl’s new blog, Sean’s escape from the 9-5 and all those other cool people out there. But the fact remains I’m not traveling, moving or having adventures. I’m just a blogger and a dreamer. I’m not where I want to be so in that respect I’m a failure. But at least I know it and want to change things. I’m not a victim, I’m responsible for my own life and so it’s up to me to make the change… I got myself into this mess, now I’m getting myself out!

Nothing new to report here, you know all this stuff

…so turn off the screen, get off your behind and start acting responsible. And you know what? It’s not about being worthy in the eyes of others. It’s about being who you want to be, regardless of others. I have nothing new to offer you, nothing that deep inside you don’t already know.

Are you with me? Let’s see what’s next. A new adventure is never far away, that’s life for you.

Some time ago I started a blogchallenge. My challenge was to grow my blog by 1600% in three months, which ment the following

• OR I have more than 500 pageviews a day for 7 consecutive days.
• OR I have more than 300 subscribers to my RSS feed

This challenge is the reason why I’ve been writing those weekly updates you’ve come to expect every saturday. The deadline for the challenge was last monday and as expected, just extrapolate the numbers in the weekly updates and it was very clear. I didn’t reach either number. Things went slow and even backwards a times. Maybe I hexed myself by choosing the snail theme for all the updates. (You did notice didn’t you?).

Subscriber number is hovering around 60 and pageviewnumbers are a roller coaster between 100 and 450 a day (rough estimates)

So, am I now a failure? I’ll leave that to you to decide. I’ve learned so much these months and have been reaching more people every week. A few have been around since I started and have been commenting on a regular basis either through twitter or on this blog.

The challenge is over, although I still want to reach those goals. I was planning on transferring this blog to it’s own domain but someone bought it, this was what actually started the challenge, he would give it to me for free is I made it. There is one huge problem however, the guy who bought it seems to have dropped off the face of the planet so I can’t get the domain I wanted. Although this does suck a bit it’s not the end of the world. I will reach those numbers, and beyond.

I’m currently on vacation but when I get back home next week I’ll start working on several things:

1. Getting this blog on it’s own domain
2. Writing more posts (of course)
3. Project Mojave, I’ve been slacking A LOT
4. The blog side-project with CN & LP
5. Buying a new computer (A desktop windows system)
6. Picking up the guitar
7. Something I haven’t done in 10 years: go fishing
8. Prepare for university
9. Writing guestposts for several blogs and hopefully receiving some as well (hint!)
10. Finishing that “bucket list” I talked about a while back

I’ve got a lot to do and as always so little time to do it in, good thing I have a “black belt” in productivity and am a master of the upside down swan. So if I seem busy I’m actually not, or am I truly busy and not to be disturbed…

I would like to thank everyone who has helped me to get this far. Thanks for all the diggs, retweets, linkbacks, comments, stumbles and what not. This blog wouldn’t be the same without you!

Cath Duncan from mineyourresources.com made a comment a while back on one of my blogposts (What all the “get rich” Blogs don’t tell you) I’d going to have a closer look at today:

I totally agree that action is what makes the difference in results – even imperfect action. In improv storytelling they have the mantra “it’s all about having as many goes as possible, rather than trying to have 1 perfect go,” and I think this is a great mantra for life, and one of the foundational ideas in Agile Living. – Cath

If you’ve been reading about personal development for a while this will sound very familiar. It’s true in all paths of life actually. Practice makes perfect but better yet failure is the way to perfection as paradoxical as it might seem at first glance.

Embrace failure as the path to success and don’t get paralyzed by your thoughts while waiting for things to unfold and happened like you want them to. They almost never happen like you thought they would.

Failure to meditate

Somehow this all makes me thing of my every day practice of meditation. More often than not it seems a total waste of time. I’m sitting there and thinking of all sorts of things while counting my breaths on auto pilot. The thought crosses my mind to just get up and stop this charade. Stop pretending to be meditating and doing it perfectly. But you know what. I’m actually meditating, although not perfectly. I just fake it untill I make it. There you have it. My meditation is fake, I’m a fraud, I’ve been meditation for little over a year now, spending roughly 130 hours in meditation so far. Can I call myself an expert on the subject? Hardly… Have I failed miserably to meditate the way I want to be meditating? Most certainly!

You could call me an expert at failure. I have over 130 solid hours of failure under my belt, and that’s only in meditation. Or you could call my entire life a failure, in which case I’ve had over 2 million hours worth of experience on the subject. By Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hour theory I’m an expert at failure many times over.
And guess what, so are you!

The expert failure

Yes my dear reader, you’re an expert at failing. That’s the bonus of not being content with your own life and reading about personal development and lifestyle design. You wouldn’t be reading about these things if you were totally content with your life now would you?

What’s the value you might think by now, why is being an expert failure useful in my life. Well, the failures we had in our early days were simple: If we failed in staying upright we might bump our heads. Later if we failed to write legible we could fail a test. Failing to apply the brakes when driving created a nice dent in the car. A simple failure got bigger and bigger consequences over time as we got better at spotting what could go wrong. By the time you graduated you had enough experience in failure to spot things before they went wrong and correct them.

If you didn’t learn from mistakes you’d be wearing a crash helmet, not be allowed to drive, couldn’t complete an education and certainly couldn’t develop your person or design your lifestyle. Your life might not be perfect right now, but be happy about it. Perfection would mean you can’t learn anything anymore and what a bore that would be.

• Embrace failure, it’s your best friend in life. Seek imperfection in everything you do. Learn from it and be happy that you failed.

More blogposts, related to this subject:

Taking a chance, it is worth the risk

Settling for perfection

You might have heard of this one. The quarter-life crisis is a phase you go through somewhere in your twenties or as Wiki puts it “a term applied to the period of life immediately following the major changes of adolescence, usually ranging from the early twenties to the early thirties.”

It’s a phase where all kinds of insecurities develop. Again, Wikipedia provides us with a nice list I’d like to share:

• feeling “not good enough” because one can’t find a job that is at one’s academic/intellectual level
• frustration with relationships, the working world, and finding a suitable job or career
• confusion of identity
• insecurity regarding the near future
• insecurity concerning long-term plans, life goals
• insecurity regarding present accomplishments
• re-evaluation of close interpersonal relationships
• disappointment with one’s job
• nostalgia for university, college, high school or elementary school life
• tendency to hold stronger opinions
• boredom with social interactions
• loss of closeness to high school and college friends
• financially-rooted stress (overwhelming college loans, unanticipated high cost of living, etc.)
• loneliness
• desire to have children
• a sense that everyone is, somehow, doing better than you

There are a few here I confess suffering from. Although I don’t feel the need to have children I do feel “not good enough”, an underachiever and the sense that everyone is doing better than me. With one foot I’m in the adult life, after all, I’m 26. But on the other hand I’m going back to university this September and hopefully will be busy with that till I’m 30 something. In the mean time all the kids I grew up with are now engineers, run their own practice or are lawyers and have been doing so for a few years now. I feel left behind.

I know there are more people out there suffering from this. After all, there is a term for it right? We feel we missed the train somehow and got left behind.

Advantages of the slow life

But taking things “slow” in this way has offered me with a perspective few other have. I doubt anyone who by the age of 26 is fully tied up in a dayjob and a social life, perhaps even with kids would have a chance to break free from it all. Let’s just say I didn’t get suckered in when I was not fully conscious about it and now am in the position to choose if I take that step and settle down.

Yes there is a downside, my monthly income is laughable to anyone working full time. To anyone working actually… I don’t own a car, all I have is a motorcycle I bought for 200 euro’s and maintain myself. (If you’re wondering what a 200 euro motorcycle looks like, follow this link.) I don’t own a fancy laptop/macbook pro and I don’t run a highly successful business. I do however have a lot of free time on my hands at the moment. I have few obligations and if I want to get up somewhere around noon that’s just fine. Sure, I have gaps in my resume you couldn’t fill with a dumptruck but who cares. That damage has been done already. I’m not successful according to most people, I stopped being that as soon as I decided the first major I took in University wasn’t for me and I dropped out for the rest of the semester. It took me almost six years to complete my training as exercise therapist which should take only four years. Again, failure. (Or look on the bright side: persistence)

Crystal mind

You know what?! I actually don’t care about all that. Yes I suffer from a quarter life crisis but it’s not stopping me. It’s actually my source of strength. The ideas on what I want to do with my life are crystallizing perfectly inside my mind and I have concrete steps I know I have to take to make these things come true. Take that you soon-to-suffer-a-midlife-crisis-former-classmates! You might have that nice job right now and the nice car (did someone say Ferrari?) but I’ve got a life philosophy, I’m writing a bucket list and I’m setting up a freedom business. None of these are signs of success in the traditional sense so I’m also working on that master’s degree to rub in their faces and learning skills I deem essential to become a Location Independent Professional (or LIP for short). The rubbing in is only a nice benefit by the way, I really want to learn those skills.

I’m 26 and I’m ready to take on the world, on my terms!

How do you feel about your life? Please leave a comment, I’d really like to know.

[update 20090611] I just stumbled across a blogpost that seems to fit in nicely with this post “I am a failure – The Biggest lie out there” and I would really like to share with you. Got it through @scottbradley[/update 20090611]