Imagine if you met someone who can’t eat watermelon. Not that they’re allergic or unable somehow, but they just haven’t figured out how to do that. So you’re like “what the hell do you mean? it works just like eating anything else, you open your mouth, sink your teeth in, take a bite and chew. If you can bite, chew and swallow, you should be able to eat a watermelon.”
And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they’d figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.
This goes back and forth. No, it’s not an emotional issue, they’re not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things (“it’s watery?” they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?
“It’s red on the inside?”
Wait, they’ve never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there’s no way to get human jaws around it.
“Oh, you’re supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides.”
And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it’s easy, it’s ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there’s no way that someone just can’t eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.
If someone can’t do something after being repeatedly told to “just do it”, there might be some key component missing that one side has no idea about, and the other side assumed was so obvious it goes without mention.
Yep.
https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.
If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. […]
I think my revised belief is that if you are stuck at how to get better at something, spend a little while assuming there’s just some trick to it you’ve missed. You can try to generate the trick yourself, but it’s probably easier to learn it by observing someone else being good at the thing, asking them some questions, and seeing if you have any lightbulb moment.
My fiance played the clarinet when he was in school. When he was first learning to play, he rented an instrument from the school to learn on. He was the last chair clarinet, had been for years, because he could not make notes that required the register key. For years, they kept making him do embrature exercises and he started to get a few notes, with lots of effort. Eventually he had to get private lessons to stay in band.
Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn’t been making much progress with the instrument.
When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school’s clarinet needed it’s pads replaced.
He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.
Sometimes you don’t need to brute force a problem. Sometimes your clarinet is just broken.
Last thing to blog for the day then I need to pretend to be productive. Little Miss has multiplication she’s still struggling with.
Anyway - I was promoted at work and asked to fix the injury and accident problem in a particular warehouse. I was “the safety guy” and I was really really good at my job. When I went in I had to find out “why are these folks having more injuries per 100,000 hours than the rest of our facilities” and so I dug in. This facility was having 2 - 3 injuries reported A DAY.
Was it the people? Nope, same hiring pool as others. Hours? Nope, almost every station has the same hours. Lets check the training for our new hires. Let me see their training packs. “Uhh… let me find them” Excuse me? You should be training them you should have them here with you.
Okay, what are the four options for loading a package? “ummm….” DUDE you’re supposed to be training these folks and you don’t know. Who trained you? “I never loaded before” Okay fine, who trained you how to be a trainer. “no one” …
See where this is going? So now all of a sudden I’m holding training classes for the top-level management team all the way down to the front-line supervisors to make sure THEY know the job that they’re supposed to be teaching to others. We broke it all down to the very basics and slowly, day by day. But you know what? The first few months, reported on job injuries went up because we raised the awareness and stopped management team from hiding the injuries and just giving a couple days off. We’re reporting them, recording them, getting treatment and care where needed.
Then we went a week with no injuries. Then a month Darn broke out streak. Why? What happened, where was the breakdown? Another week. A month WE MADE IT A YEAR Then another six months Then I got promoted again and replicated this across the country and that original operation went nearly 3 years without an injury.
So start at the very beginning if you’re having trouble with something or having trouble teaching someone something. If they want to write, they have to be able to hold the pencil.
