Want to become an Expert?

[AnasaziWrites]

It's more than 10,000 hours.
By chance, I ran across this video describing what it takes to become an expert. The video does not mention calligraphy or writing at any point, but it could easily could have. I found it fascinating, showing, among other things, the limitation of online demonstrations of a desired skill leading to expertise, and why the self-taught master (like Ken Fraser) is so rare.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA

[Zivio]

I enjoyed this very much, and just about anything Veritasium does!  Thanks for sharing.  Being uncomfortable and the concept of "deliberate practice," as opposed to doing what is fun and comfortable, was a good reminder to inform my own study. I think the recent Inktober 2022 event was a great example of this for perhaps many of us. 

I also loved seeing Lara Somogyi's input on learning and playing harp, which is an activity that also challenges me, and perhaps @Lucie Y.  I'm only now approaching the first 1,000 hour mark in learning to write cursive again, so 10,000 is not likely in my lifetime in any case. 

[Lucie Y]

@Zivio Nice to hear from you! I somehow missed your post where you mentioned me but I'm glad I found it anyway
@AnasaziWrites thank you for the link

This video resonates on many levels for me. It's great but it hurts a little, as I see how I made the same learning mistakes over and over in several areas of my life (academic, musical and creative) and crashed and burned a couple of times because of it.
Now I'm a brute force kind of person. When something is difficult I throw myself at it full speed and put hours and hours into it. But I was doing it wrong for years, because I wasn't having deliberate practice.

The missing element for me is that I didn't trust my brain to assimilate the info. I would just do hours and hours of repeating what I was learning, and when there was free time, more hours, no rest. I realize now I was just overwhelming my brain.

It ruined my relationship to the cello @Zivio (this is my nemesis instrument). A couple of years ago I started learning the harp and did the same mistakes, which made me good in the beginning, but then I hit a plateau.

I alse ruined my relationship to calligraphy 5 years ago when learning Italics. I completely overdid it, never stepped back, and ultimately drove myself sick and and tired.

This year I have learned deliberate practice, and one hour of that is better than 10 hours of non deliberate practice. It's also 10 times more exhausting to troubleshoot everything you do.

Becoming a mom a year and a week ago also helped me in a way, because in order to make the most of my free time, I have to set little goals (get those 2-3 measures straight, improve the letter spacing on this script), and move from one mini goal to another from one day to the next, which makes me much more consistent.

I still rage internally because I want to go back to bulldozer mode and go all wrecking ball through the various blocks I encounter.

But it doesn't exactly work that way does it?   

In a way, this is teaching me a lot about life. I am learning to trust that my brain was exposed to the info and will consolidate it if I just leave it alone. Knowing when to stop, realizing my brain won't benefit from any more practice for today and that continuing might actually be counterproductive.
It makes me accept that such things take time, when you want to generate what is beautiful and meaningful. Just like relationships, like healing, and like personal growth.

But darn, it's hard to accept sometimes 

[tiffany.c.a]

Really interesting video. I’ll consider it as I think about my own practice habits. Thanks for sharing.

Lucie, what you say makes so much sense. Our brains process things in ways we can’t quite pinpoint when it’s happening, but it happens. It’s really an amazing process, how we learn and improve, and how our brains take practice and synthesize it further in a way we can’t replicate with conscious external maneuverings. We need the repetitions, but we also need the long-term processing that happens even as we rest.