You become a writer by writing.
You become a leader by leading.
You become a doctor by doctoring.
You can learn the principles and the ideas behind these fields from books and courses. But the skill to do them is only developed through practice.
Zig Ziglar said: “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly.” That’s where you must start.
Anything worth being only comes about as a result of doing.
Seth Godin has a short chapter in his book The Practice on his experience learning to fly fish.
At the retreat, he specifically requested that he not have a hook attached to his rod so he could focus instead on the practice of casting perfectly.
Without the hook (and therefore without any chance of catching anything), there was no way he could obsess over the outcome. He was focused on the process when everybody else was focused on catching a fish.
The result—he learned how to cast perfectly and mastered fly fishing. His friends obsessed over making a catch and failed to develop the necessary skills.
This is how artists must work. They must focus on the process, not the outcome. They must create and ship work on a regular basis without worrying about whether or not this project will be “the one.”
Process, not outcome. That’s where we need to redirect our focus.
If we don’t set out to create a masterpiece, it’s much more likely we’ll make one in the end.
(A personal aside: I realized after reading this passage that my dad was an artist in the same way. He loved fishing and genuinely did not care if he caught a fish or not in the process. He was totally at peace on a boat or pier casting and reeling, over and over. He had the mindset and demeanor of a true artist.)
If you spend any time coding, you’ll quickly discover that you don’t know, can’t remember, or never learned something you need to make your project work.
Enter Google (or whatever search engine you prefer*).
All you have to do is type in a few words related to the problem you’re trying to solve and voila! You’ve got your solution.
Seth Godin says in his great talk, “Stop Stealing Dreams,” that there’s no longer any need to memorize stuff. And this is exactly why—if you need something, you can just look it up.
I would agree with him, but I’d also take that idea a step farther.
As you look things up and implement them in your projects (and not just coding projects either), they will eventually become muscle memory.
The important thing is implementation—put what you look up to use immediately so that it slowly becomes a part of your vocabulary.
I think there are two points to this post:
*Instead of using Google, I’d highly recommend you check out Ecosia as your new search engine. Here’s why:
While you’re developing your “Googling” skills, consider switching to Ecosia today.
I’ve been spending an hour (sometimes more) each day learning to code for the last couple of weeks using Codecademy.
And from the beginning, I noticed something different about this learning experience…
It works.
Codecademy gets it right because it’s project-based, self-directed learning.
I don’t sit through lectures and get quizzed on my ability to recall information. I don’t memorize a bunch of facts only to forget them half an hour later.
Instead, I work out specific coding problems; I build projects using the coding languages I’m learning.
In short, I’m building and practicing skills.
We don’t learn by accumulating and regurgitating information. We learn by developing skills through constant, sometimes mundane practice.
That’s how da Vinci did it. It’s how Mozart did it. It’s how Steve Jobs did it.
How can you work projects and problem solving into your education?
It amazes me how many companies still require their prospective employees to hold college degrees before they’ll even CONSIDER talking to them about work…
Especially because so many companies are founded by college dropouts, straight-D students, and vocal critics of modern education.
With so much information and easily accessible methods to build the skills necessary to do competitive work, college is quickly becoming a handicap more than anything else.
It’s four years spent in a classroom accumulating information rather than developing skills, building projects, and doing actual work. (And yes, I’m a college graduate who’s criticizing EXACTLY what I went through).
Never will you be required to sit through hours of lecture and regurgitate information on tests in your working career. But that’s what I’d estimate 90% of college is.
How does that help a company looking to hire for a role? Obviously it doesn’t.
I’d like to see more companies embrace what Apple, Google, Amazon, and other big tech companies are doing:
Value competence and proven skills over accreditation and papers.
Show you can do the work and forget what your “education” was all about.
Hopefully more companies will remember their founders’ roots and get out of this antiquated industrial mindset.
Imagine a web designer sitting at her desk.
There’s this nasty problem plaguing her current project. For the life of her, she can’t figure it out…
What does she do? She sits and thinks and thinks and thinks until she comes up with a solution.
Right?
Wrong!
She’s a designer—she builds her way forward.
She writes a line of code and runs it. Does that fix the problem? No. Did she fail? NO! She just learned something about her code.
So she writes another line and tries again. She builds her way past the problem one line of code at a time.
Maybe we should approach more of our problems like designers.
Instead of trying to think our way forward, we build.
There is only feedback.
People who develop a growth mindset view every failure as a learning opportunity, not an end result.
Either you succeed or you learn. But you never fail.
Of course, something might not work out like you planned. But as long as you learn from the incident and improve, did you really fail?
Each of us has an internal narrative constantly chattering about who we are.
But what we don’t always realize is that internal narrative influences how we behave.
If you tell yourself the story that, “Overeating makes me feel happy,” that story might be a stand-in for the real story—“I’m unhappy with different aspects of my life and overeating gives me a small dose of pleasure.”
Until you realize this, you’ll continue to overeat and live on greasy fast food multiple times each week.
(I know this because it’s a story I’m trying to rewrite myself).
If you tell yourself a story that says, “I’m not skilled at sales or business,” you might never realize your unresolved dream of starting your own venture and working for yourself.
The first step to overcoming many of our chronic issues is to start telling ourselves a different story.
Changing what you do starts by changing your identity—who you believe yourself to be.
Change the story, change the person.
50 years ago, you had to stage a grand opening to the masses to your event or business.
If you wanted to open a store, you banked a lot of money (usually borrowed), on the fact that you had to get a lot of customers right away, or you’d go bust.
So you’d hype everyone up. You’d send out mailers, run TV commercials, tell everyone you knew to spread the word to your friends.
Hype, hype, hype!
Then you’d hold the grand opening with those big scissors and red tape (metaphorical or otherwise). And it would either succeed—you’d make the money you needed to stay afloat.
Or it would fail, and you’d potentially go bankrupt.
We still have that “one-shot” mentality today. Whether it’s starting a business, writing a song, publishing a book, whatever—we still feel like we’ve got one shot to succeed.
That everything hinges on one big moment where either everyone hears about it…or they don’t and you fail.
The reality is, the internet has made the grand opening both unnecessary and obsolete.
If you write something that doesn’t perform well, so what?! You can show up and do it again tomorrow… and do it better.
If you start a business, but don’t get any traction, so what? The stakes for failing in a digital business are minuscule compared to what it used to be.
You don’t need grand openings anymore. You don’t need hundreds or thousands of customers and followers right away to be successful.
You now have unlimited chances to attract the people you want to serve. Failing is often free.
Start small, serve well, and let it grow over time. That’s the key to succeeding in the modern age.
This is the primary sign of being a mature, well-balanced adult:
The ability—AND WILLINGNESS—to change your mind about something you believe or hold dear in the face of new information.
You’ll be ridiculed for it. You’ll be called a “flip-flopper“. But so what?
You’re growing and learning, adapting and changing. That’s all that matters.
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