I find daily routines to be absolutely fascinating, and I'm definitely not the only one.
I honestly don't know what drives us to create and consume
day-in-my-life vlogs, beauty routines, what-I-eat-in-a-day documentations,
but I would guess that it has something to do with tribalism.
My theory would be that we want to feel like we're part of a community,
and when we find people that we like, we may aspire to imitate them.
And oftentimes, this leads us to asking, "what's your current daily routine?"
when really we should be asking for what all of their past routines were.
Because yeah, it's great that they've reached such an impressive level,
but I want to know how you got there.
How much time and effort did it take, and what will I have to commit to in order to be like you?
Similarly, I'm sure many of you are familiar with the 10,000-hour rule, which is
the minimum number of hours that a few well-known psychologists have found
is required to become an absolute mastery-level expert in any challenging field.
But what if i'm not ready to commit three hours a day for the next 10 years of my life to something?
Here's where "The First 20 hours" comes in.
Apparently there's a book on the subject, but I didn't actually read the book -
I just saw the Ted Talk, where author Josh Kaufman explains that if it takes
10,000 hours for someone to become a true master at something,
there's got to be a lesser amount of time for someone to just become decent at something.
How long would it take
for you to decide whether or not something is for you, before you fully commit to it?
And his answer is 20 hours.
Here's the ridiculous part:
in his Ted Talk, he doesn't really explain where he got that number from,
but just the same, I definitely was intrigued by the number 20 hours,
so i decided to give it a shot.
You see, I've always loved drawing.
When people say "follow your bliss," I think about drawing, painting, scribing -
that's always been it for me.
I remember being little and feeling like an absolute wizard
when I could make some blobs and lines on a piece of paper
and other humans would look at it and feel something.
I fell in love with storytelling - color, light, shadow, form, and mechanics.
It has always felt like the purest form of communication,
but sadly, as years have gone by, I have become more and more
terrified of drawing, and I didn't really understand the aversion
that I had to my own true love until I read Angela Duckworth's book Grit.
Grit is defined as a "sustained application of effort towards a long-term goal"
(aka stamina).
Angela's research found that oftentimes, talent is INVERSELY related to Grit,
so if you're told that you're talented, and you believe it too much,
then you might start to think you don't have to work as hard.
You then realize subconsciously that when you make it look natural and effortless,
you get rewarded, so when it no longer feels natural and effortless,
you think, "I'm not going to get rewarded,"
and often times, people stop wanting to work hard then,
because they reach the top level of their ability, and
they can't get that same reward of feeling talented
when you're spending all of this effort and energy trying to improve.
So I never really matured past the level of skill that I had back when I stopped,
but she does explain that you can move past this by developing a personal drive -
a greater sense of purpose beyond pleasure -
and an obsessive fascination of the subject.
You've just got to focus on consistent daily improvements
and enthusiasm for each individual day.
I gotta get back to my desk now.
This all gave me hope - if i committed to 20 hours of drawing over a week
and just focused on the day-to-day act of it,
then maybe my fear of failure would subside enough,
simply through committed repetition, for me to actually gain back my love for the act of drawing.
So that's what I did.
For the past seven days, I have put in three hours a day into drawing.
I embraced the feeling of failure and had to constantly remind myself
that only through recognizing my failures and addressing
these shortcomings can my skills improve.
And though I definitely wouldn't agree with Josh Kaufman's insistence
that you will be astonished by how good you are at the end of this,
I definitely felt myself overcoming the frustration
barrier of feeling painfully incompetent.
Here are some of my notes over this experimental week.
So in the aftermath of this experience,
in summary, do I feel like I'm more of an expert than I was last week?
Am I more confident in my skills?
Definitely not. I'm not about to show you anything I've been working on.
It's not going to happen right now - but I do think that this was still valuable.
And the main thing that I got from it is that I'm no longer afraid to start.
I lost that initial fear.
So although I do want to keep working on things, I don't have to go through
that roadblock initially of sitting down and putting pen to paper,
and for that, I think it was worth it.
At least now, I have hope.
'til next time!
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