One Thing at a Time

I wrote something similar in my post about attention, but this felt relevant to adult learning as well.

I’ve been learning how to play guitar for the last month or so, and before that, for the last few years, I’ve been (slowly) teaching myself how to draw.

And something that started out feeling difficult, but which has gotten easier as I’ve realised how useful it is, is to focus on one thing at a time.

As an adult learner, you are likely to have more taste than skill, and therefore you will very clearly see how far you are from your goal of where you want to be. And there is a temptation to rush, to try and do too many things, to try and learn many things at once.

But that’s likely to make you feel like you’re not getting better, or not fast enough, or that the journey is more difficult than you can manage.

But focussing on one thing at a time – for however long it takes – allows you to see your progress more granularly, more clearly, and it makes it easier to keep going.

I suppose this is similar to when I quit smoking, and every time I thought about staying quit forever, it felt impossible, but when I thought about the next fifteen minutes, it was smaller, more doable. And then you do it for a few years, and you can imagine that future journey more easily.

I’ve been watching a fair few classical guitar videos, and whether it’s performances or music theory or technique videos, once in a while I see something that reminds me of the huge (huuuuuuuge) gap between my playing and theirs, and I think, Oh, I’m never going to be able to do that.

And then I remember that I learnt all the minor pentatonic scale patterns in about three days, and before that, I went from knowing no music theory to understanding the major and minor scales in about a week, because I focused on learning one thing at a time, rather than everything all at once.

I remember, particularly, in my early days of drawing, I’d try too many new things at once, and that’d lead me to stall out and not draw again for months at a time. I was still, I suppose, teaching myself how to learn.

Looking back, I’m almost embarrassed at how much harder I made things for myself. I needed to remember that I was doing a hard thing, and that takes a long time. And second, I focussed on where I felt I needed to be, rather than looking at where I was and taking one step in the right direction.

The only thing you can do right now is to try and be better than you were yesterday, and the best way to do it, particularly when you’re starting out, is to try and get better at one thing at a time.

(Here’s why I wrote this. I’m currently learning the fingerpicking pattern on “The House of the Rising Sun”, and after about five days on consistently sucking, I managed to go a whole sixteen bars getting the right-hand picking correct without accidentally plucking the wrong string. My chord changes still suck, but I got one thing right, and it made me smile. That’s what it’s all about.)