Nerdy Monologues of an Autodidact
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.
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…
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…