Slowly improving by working on your foundations

Or taking a page out of Kathy Sierra's book

I first got introduced to Kathy Sierra via her book Head First Java, part of the Head First Series that she co-created.

It was a very different kind of textbook and one I still remember today because it was written with the thesis that textbooks didn't need to just be dry text.

They could have pictures and jokes to engage the reader, which would make it easier for them to learn and for the lessons to stick.

Subsequent books in the head first series went on to cover other topics such as SQL, javascript, as well as more general skills like Web Design.

She's also an excellent speaker and if you've never seen her videos, give them a watch!

One of the ideas she espouses which I think is really important is all about skill improvement, the fundamental thesis is this, you can divide skills into three broad categories:

1. Things you can't do
2. Things you can do with some effort
3. Things you've mastered

By practising any skill moves up this ladder, step by step going from something out of reach to a level of familiarly that is internalised. This happens to such an extent that anyone looking at you performing it has difficulty understanding that there wasn't a time you couldn't do it.

Skills thought of in this way are very small, as I'm writing this, I'm perhaps exercising my:

1. Writing ability, IE all of my general baseline English vocabulary and essay writing skills
2. Framing complex thoughts into ideas
3. Throwing together an initial outline / rough draft
4. Taking a rough draft and refining it
5. Identifying parts that are vague and rewriting them
6. Modelling my audience and empathetically trying to understand whether the structure is clear
7. Touch typing

And so on.

These can perhaps be broken down into subskills.

For example 3) Throwing together an initial outline can be expanded into the subskills:

1. writing a brief skeleton of an idea
2. knowing when to go into detail so I won't forget key points
3. juggling what I want to say in my head so I won't forget it while I'm drafting

Many of these may seem like pedantic minor things, but carefully read things written by others enough and you'll slowly gain a sense of what these atomic skills are by which ones different writers are excellent at or haven't yet picked up.

So over time these skills that we exercise become completely automatic, 🎉 we've mastered them!

Success right? Not necessarily.

You see in our quest to acquire ever more skills we may have internalised and mastered a skill in a substandard way.

If you think about it, that's perfectly understandable, you're learning a lot of different things, and some stuff you get to the point of saying, yea, that's good enough.

In my case a simple example is touch-typing, I can touch-type, I'm pretty fast at it, but is it excellent? No. I could definitely be faster, by miles, and it slows me down at times, but not yet often enough that I feel the pain of trying to fix it, yet.

To take a page from the 10,000 hours philosophy, I've spent 10,000 hours practicing how to touch-type a bit better than average.

So the key insight that Kathy talks about is this idea, that sometimes to progress you have to take something that you might find that you're ok at and go back to the drawing board, or even something that you think you're good at!

Perhaps it's just not working the way it needs to for you to perform at that higher level.

So you need to do the slow, painful, difficult thing of taking something that you may think is boring because you can do it and approach it like a novice.

Personally, I think that this is also why people find they plateau on stuff like math or art, they underestimate the value of very foundational skills that they already feel like they can perform well enough.

I know I've done it, but I've also gone through the process of spending some quality time with stuff that I thought was "easy", but trying to do it "properly" and found that it makes a big difference.

So what's a thing that you've always wanted to get better at, but keep finding it hard to do no matter what you try? Perhaps examine the steps involved in doing them, perhaps you'll figure out what's been the blocker preventing you from rising higher =)...