Leisa Michelle

Nerdy Monologues of an Autodidact

Don’t Strive to Be the Best – Strive to be Better

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The power went out just now as I was publishing a new blog post. Perfect timing, right? I flopped down on the couch to decide what to do with my electricity-less, internet-less time. And I began thinking back to when I was in high school and my friend Angie and I plotted our ultimate learning project: our rise to Renaissance Man stardom. We wanted to be like Leonardo da Vinci and the other historical “masters of all trades”.

We loosely acted on our plans. We made a list of all things that a true Renaissance Man should know: classic music, biology, art history, world history, math, politics, among others. A true Renaissance Man should be one of the most capable people in the world in all these subjects, we agreed. He (or she) had to be the best. So naturally, we made being the best our goal.

We never became Renaissance Men. In fact, we failed quite miserably.

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20hrs to Competence – How I Learned to Do Vector Portraits

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I saw this TED Talk by Josh Kaufman a while back called The First 20 Hours – How to Learn Anything. The takeaway was basically that it only takes 20 hours to become reasonably good at something. Pick a specific skill you want to be good at. Put 20 hours into it. See what happens.

I did just that over the past week without realizing it. I spent between 20-25hrs on this portrait of Newt Scamander from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Take a look.

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I don’t believe in family loyalty

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I don’t believe in family loyalty.

Read that one more time: I don’t believe in family loyalty.

The first time that thought entered my head, I was horrified. I actually felt ashamed. I promptly told myself, “What a terrible thing to think! How could you even let that thought run through your mind? Get rid of it. Never think that again.”

But a few days later, it came back to me. Hearing it the second time, I was still shocked, but this time I was able to take a look at why. And after a lot of thinking, I’ve really accepted it.

I don’t believe in family loyalty. And I don’t think you should either.

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A Good Ol’ “I Almost Died” Kind of Failure

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Spoiler alert: You’re most likely to experience failure when you try something new. I fell a lot over the weekend. I went left instead of right, backward instead of forward. I even almost died. Outlined below are the failures that came out of my first-ever ski trip…

…with an emphasis on the “almost-dying” part.

I went skiing for the first time last weekend in Spytkowice, Poland. I was super excited to not just try out skiing, but also to see the Polish countryside and not speak English. It was a great trip overall. I had a lot of fun, learned a lot of new Polish expressions, and made some new friends. I also almost had a run in with the Grim Reaper himself. For real.

You see, being from Florida, snow is new to me. The dynamics and physics of snow + skis was completely foreign. I couldn’t figure out how to control my movements. The instructor tried to help me, but well, I just couldn’t be helped. While my two other “first time skiing” friends (those bastards knew how to ski — I swear they must have had Olympic medals stuffed in their luggage…) drifted across the snow gracefully, I was trying my hardest to inch forward and not slide backward. I started to feel bad that I seemed to be holding everyone back. I tried to just mentally convince myself that I was an Olympic-grade skier, a pure-bred polar bear, Queen Elsa of Arendelle. But that only seemed to make it worse. Keep reading…

That Time I Got a C in Calculus

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Failure is often relative and subjective. What I see as a devastating shortcoming might not seem that devastating to you. And hidden somewhere in that truth, there’s something to be said about failure itself being all in our heads. But I’m not going to explore that today. Instead I’m going to talk about the time I got a C in calculus.

I grew up a typical, goody-two-shoes, butt-kissing, overachiever. I had straight A’s my whole life up until college. I aced all my tests, destroyed all my standardized exams, everything. And when I got to uni, overachieving got to be a bit tougher, but I still managed to do really well in my classes. With the exception of my calculus class, that is.

On my first calc test I got a 68%, which was really hard to come to terms with at first because the entire test was just a review of everything you should know before you start calculus.
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