Doing before learning
There are two ways to begin learning:
- Learn the theory, then make it.
- Start making it, then go looking for theory when you hit a wall.
I prefer the second one. Mostly because I followed the first way for a majority of my life, and it hasn’t worked great. The second one works wonderfully well. This is my attempt at explaining why that happens.
Theory first has been the standard approach of all my formal education. It goes like this: you enroll in a course with a fixed syllabus and get introduced to everything that learned scholars or experts or whatever have already said. You consume these scriptures with little room to question them. Then suddenly it’s your turn to make something, in a college assignment or in a job, and it is a terrible position to be put in. Theory first has trained you to find flaws in your work before your work exists. It taught you concepts without ever letting you connect the dots yourself, and made you a passive consumer. It had you critique masterpieces you did not have the skills to make. It handed you best practices before you could even draw poorly. It made you a perfectionist before you had written a page. It is crippling, because it makes you too conscious of your own limitations. With that force working against you, you stay stuck in semi-competence, which I believe is the worst place to stand if you want to create anything real.
The second way is kinder, at least in the beginning, which is when you need kindness the most. Before semi-competence there is dumbness. Dumb fear, but also dumb confidence. You do not know what you do not know. You are free to believe you can paint a Mona Lisa or write a Crime and Punishment, which I honestly prefer. It gives me the courage to dream about making things I do not yet have the skills to make. And skills build when you keep showing up.
That is exactly what happened with me. I started writing a book this year because I was too stupid to realise how hard it was. Along the way I met publishers and professors who tried to discourage me, and I was too naive to understand the discouragement. Nine months later I can say it was a great decision. Most of the content that needs to go in the book is written. I am a much better writer than I was, and I have a process that I built out of my own experience rather than borrowing from an expert.
The second way gives you speed too. For research I have gone through more material this year than in my life before it, and I have learned to parse it faster and understand it better.
But there does come an inevitable point when you hit the wall. You hit a problem and you don’t even have the language to define it. You don’t know how to solve it and you don’t know where to look. That is the trade-off. I was stuck on one such problem for a month, when I would start writing about an idea, and lay down all my thoughts, but they stayed disconnected. I didn’t know how to make my bundle of lines into a paragraph. That is until yesterday, when I randomly came across an article that taught me about semantic waves, which is what I needed. At some point, you do indeed need the theory, and it may not come the easiest way.
The article would have meant nothing to me in June, when I had nothing to apply it to. It only helped because I had already reached the place where it could. To be helped by theory you have to first reach a place where it can be used. So, I wouldn’t call the stuck month a failure of diving first, rather it was an inevitable step in the right direction, the only way towards rescue.