Nicole Junkerman on Learning Something Badly First

There is a stage at the beginning of anything where you are plainly no good at it, and it is the stage most people arrange to skip. The arrangement usually takes the form of reading about the thing instead of doing it, which is pleasant and teaches you very little. Nicole Junkerman keeps a short list of notes about that stage, because it comes round again every time something new is started and the lessons never quite stick.

• Begin before you are ready, because ready never arrives. Waiting to understand a thing before attempting it reverses the order in which understanding actually turns up. The first attempt is not a test of talent. It is how the question gets asked properly, and the answer tends to be more specific than any amount of preparation would have produced.
• Keep the bad early work. Not to admire it and not to wince at it, but because it is the only honest record of what the difficulty felt like. Six months later it explains, better than memory ever could, why a particular step seemed impossible and what it was that eventually moved.
• Stay a beginner longer than feels comfortable. There is a strong pull towards the first level of competence, where the thing can be done acceptably and stops being embarrassing. Quite a lot of the interesting territory is just past that point, and reaching it means being willing to be clumsy for longer than the minimum.
• Choose something with a short feedback loop. A language, an instrument, a recipe, a route walked at a pace you have not tried: the useful beginnings are the ones where you find out quickly whether the attempt worked. Slow feedback is not a moral failing, but it makes the early months much harder to stay inside.
• Let it be unimportant. Nothing kills a new skill faster than a plan for what it is going to become. A thing done badly on a Tuesday evening for no reason at all survives for years. A thing with a purpose attached to it tends to be dropped the first week the purpose looks unlikely.

What all five have in common is patience with the unimpressive part. There is a companion note here on what machines learn by trying, which comes at the same idea from the other direction: attempts carry information that theories cannot, and most of the information is in the attempts that went wrong.

Late October suits a beginning of this kind. The evenings are long enough to hold one, the year is nearly done asking for anything, and nobody expects a result. The writing and reading pages keep the slower version of the same habit, and the notebook is where the clumsy first pages go.