Well the counter-argument to that is: why do you need to achieve mastery? You can be happy with the slow progress you make along the way. You don't need to be Picasso to enjoy painting.
I don't think most people strive for mastery. But many things just aren't that fun or satisfying if you don't at least achieve competence.
A lot of hobbies, crafts, and activities really only start to become fun (rather than "rewarding but tiring") when you start to get good at them, because you have to think/work less hard to achieve basic satisfying outcomes.
>I don't think most people strive for mastery. But many things just aren't that fun or satisfying if you don't at least achieve competence.
Learning how to play the guitar was frustrating for me, but my stubbornness to be able to play the music I listened to is what kept me going. I'm constantly listening to music and I knew I would enjoy it in the long run so I'm glad I stuck with it, but man, the first hundred hours or so of learning honestly wasn't enjoyable to me. I love it now but it felt like a chore at the time.
I always laugh when people remark that some dancer "makes it look easy". Because it is easy when you've trained enough. And the more you train at it, the funner it gets.
I think this "making it look easy" is probably most relevant for ballet, where high level dancers still train very "basic" movements or use a lot of muscular effort to create the illusion of lightness etc.
For me any style that has decided on moves. Salsa, Swing, Ballroom. I can jump around at a club to pop/house/techno/etc... but once I have to follow specific steps with a partner I have a huge hurdle.
I tried taking salsa classes once. Was going to 4 classes a week. The instructor told me it would be a year before I'd be able to lead. Of course that was one instructor's opinion. I stopped after 4 weeks and feeling like I was making zero progress. It was not fun to feel like I was in everyone else's way not being able to keep up or not being able to transition from one move to the next. Also not really a fan of salsa.
I've taken maybe 10 swing dance classes as well but zero progress. Bad teachers maybe.
As a swing dancer / salsa dancer, the best approach I found is to stick with one dance, and practice it repeatedly ... say every weekend for a month. You need to get to the point where you're not focused on your footwork in order to be able to focus on the arms/leading.
Also, find a place where the partners swap / dance around, ideally during the lessons as well, you'll learn more and won't feel like you're boring everyone. You'll also recognize more people and possibly be more willing to ask people to dance.
I did much better when sticking to one style, getting it down, then starting the next. I found that mixing them just got them muddled.
I also found I greatly preferred swing, both the music (former sax/clarinet player) and the crowds. Swing dancers seemed more focused on having fun and generally less snobby.
As for leading, I improved greatly when I:
1: found a few partners who could back lead to show me what I was doing wrong. Its generally poor technique, but it greatly helps with getting the strong connection needed to telegraph the moves.
2: Understood the connections and flow enough to vary the patterns on my own.
It's a great way to make up for all the time stuck sitting a computer.
Thanks for the advice. I did stick to one style while learning. You say a month every weekend but that's just 4 lessons. I had 16 salsa lessons over 4-5 weeks and made no progress. The swing lessons were later.
Pretty much any style that has prescribed technique to it (not just random movements). Partnership dancing comes to mind. It takes years of training to make it look effortless, and it is (for the dancers). Even the best regularly go over the basics again and again.
Yea, the counter to mastery is the realization that you can get to a useful place in most areas with 100 hours or less of effort.
It’s nowhere near enough time to become say a short order cook, but plenty of time to learn to make bacon and eggs for breakfast in whatever specific way you want it.
Learning when to stop at a satisfactory level is equally hard as learning when to floor it and push against some difficult goal.
I think even 100 honest hours learning something will get you further than you probably need to go, e.g. basic home maintenance stuff that is just 1. find the right youtube video, 2. have the tools, 3. don't be a moron.
god knows that my far beyond satisfactory level of dotfile / config tweaking has probably paid fewer dividends than I'd like to think...
Your first sentence stands well on its own. I suspect if you shadowed a short order cook for 2.5x 40 hour work weeks, you would be able to function as a short order cook yourself. The entire point of that job is to prepare food that takes a short time to deliver. This means lots of rote tasks which can be performed rapidly.
Cook doesn’t only cook by the way. The fact that you can remember a recipe doesn’t mean you will be able to easily adapt to the lack of certain ingredients on the market and/or optimise the cost of the finished product.
Even Picasso was a jack of many trades. I am in no position to decide whether or not he was a master in every field by the end of his life, but I know for certain he was mediocre at all of them at some point.
I find this is true for the handful of multi-talented people I know in my personal life. They truly have innate talent/ability in at least one area. Sometimes they have a remarkable ability to learn new things quicker than most people, other times they have to work hard for everything else, but they always have their natural talent to fall back on, in times of duress or limited energy. I'd be interested to see some research in this area.
I know a lot of seemingly "talented" people. How do they pick up a new instrument in 2-3 months? Or be able to balance on a skateboard after just a little while? Or get kills better than me with only 200 CS GO hours clocked?
The answer is always that they spent a lot of focused time earlier in life, or that they spend a lot of time that I wasn't aware of -- like I find out that they have 2500 hours in CS:S on another account... yeah that makes a lot more sense.
I don't believe innate talent exists. Other than that some people are mentally quicker, or have faster reflexes, or are physically more capable -- "general" things. But talent exists only from both hard work and time, which for many things can start at age 2 or 3.
>I don't believe innate talent exists. Other than that some people are mentally quicker, or have faster reflexes, or are physically more capable -- "general" things
I don't understand how this distinction is supposed to work. If someone has exactly the 'general natural inclinations' that fit to a certain activity, it seems asinine to not call them talented in it. Sure, they won't be skilled in it unless they actually put in the work, but they'll comparatively have an easier time with it.
They might be thinking of the tendency for people to assume talent in a particular task is something you are born with, not the general aptitudes for that task.
Like when one person says "A natural born musician" they are usually not just suggesting the person has general traits good for music. They often just believe the person was born with musical talent pre-programmed somehow.
"I don't believe innate talent exists" - This, in light of 100 years of (mathematized quantitative genetics) and thousands of years of empirical observation, is a profoundly wrong observation. There is variation in, broadly speaking, traits and (almost) all physiological and behavioral traits are heritable. Do you believe that taller parents tend to have taller offspring? I guess the answer is yes; then, it is not any different for other traits that are less-observable, for example control of motor functions.
There is a time, early in life, during which traits are more plastic, for a variety of reasons (for height, nutritional interventions are more likely to be successful early in life than during the teenage years), but you won't make a genetically slow phenotype into a top 1% 100-m specialist.
> truly have innate talent/ability in at least one area
How are you assessing that?
In the Picasso example it seems you are confusing "practiced extensively since early childhood with extraordinary external support and training and unusual personal motivation" with "innately talented" (whatever the latter is even supposed to mean). I would imagine that some of the people you know have some similar (probably less extreme) background.
What kids find easy or hard has substantially to do with past experience.
Watching my 2 small kids learn and grow, they can over the course of a few months go from not wanting to try something at all because it seems impossible or scary to performing competently, with the only thing in the middle being occasional short attempts (like 10 minutes at a time), spaced weeks apart. Then once they feel basic competence, they can continue to improve very rapidly, while having a better and better time.
Just before the pandemic we had gathered 4 3-year-olds together. Kid A was embarrassed at being a beginner riding a balance bike and refused to even try because kid B was already skilled at it (kid A is now also a pro 1 year later), neither of kids A and B wanted to try going across the monkey bars while kid C had no problem (because his dad had been encouraging him with candy placed further and further away along the monkey bars for a few months), kid C who didn't do much daily running compared to the others felt bad that he was much slower at running.
And the same can be seen for drawing, throwing a ball, reading, playing a musical instrument, speaking a second language, solving simple logic puzzles, building with construction toys ....
At this level, none of these differences are primarily due to "innate talent". There are multiple orders of magnitude difference in skill to gain in a very short time, with fast returns to small amount of spaced practice.
I know I plan to pick up sewing this year. It isn't something I've ever given any thought, but I've fallen down a rabbit hole in the last few weeks and am excited to start mending my own clothes and creating new outfits.
One of my favorite things in life is to get into a rabbit hole of a new hobby. This usually comes with lots of energy from the excitement and learning something new.
I also love listening to friends and others talk about whatever hobby they are deep into. It's fascinating how almost anything can become someone's main hobby and passion.
Think what happens when the number of possible outputs is smaller than the number of possible inputs.
If we have a hash function f(n) that outputs a number between 1-100, but n can be any number between 1-1000, then some inputs must result in collisions.
