Category: People

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Reason for practicing

When I come back from a skiing trip, I typically have mixed feelings. On the one hand, skiing is fun, but on the other hand, I know that I cannot do it often enough to improve my technique substantially. And for me, part of the joy of doing something is learning to do it better. So if I know that progress is not possible, I wonder wha’s the point of doing the thing at all.

After our recent trip to Whistler I feel differently. I am fired up to get on the slope again as soon as possible. I believe that this is entirely thanks to my daughter (well, maybe also partially because I bought new skis, which are great fun). She is seven years old, and it was the first time that we were actually able to ski together. Her progress was so sudden: last time she attempted skiing, she was barely able to keep balance on the flattest surface we could find, but this year, she took two days of instruction at the kids’ skiing school and after that could confidently stop and turn on a legitimate green-level run.

My wife and I also took a lesson, to re-calibrate ourselves after the long break in skiing. The advice our instructors gave me, as we were chatting over hot chocolate during the lunch break, was that the focus of practicing for me should be improving efficiency of my skiing. The reason is that pretty soon our daughter would want to ski more and more, so to keep up with her (and to enjoy it), I need to get better too. I like the idea. It resonates with what Anders Ericsson said in “Peak”: the reason to keep practicing a skill, even knowing that we won’t be able to reach the absolute peak performance (there are so many people better than us ataxy given activity), is to be able to enjoy it alongside our children.

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Adult beginners

I am studying violin and piano alongside my six-year-old daughter. We both started from the same level – absolute beginners. Yet at the music store, our lesson books are in different sections. I am classified as an adult beginner, while she is a beginner without a modifier. This made me think whether our experiences of learning music are really that different.

I think we, adult beginners, do approach music differently: we are both more and less serious about it. And in both instances, we are wrong.

On the one hand, being a hobby, music is quite low on the list of adults’ priorities. This prevents them from focussing on the practice completely, instead of worrying at the back of their minds whether they should be doing something else at the moment. By not maintaining the focus, the adult beginners miss an essential component of an optimal (read:enjoyable) experience.

At the same time, and ironically in contradiction to the point above, adults expect too much from the music practice in terms of results. For children, the practice itself is the game. My daughter literally plays music, so it is an autotelic activity for her. I, on the other hand, may be able to convince myself with the logical part of my brain that the practice itself is the goal, but somewhere on the background there is an expectation of a payoff, e.g., improvement of my technique. In other words, I play to learn how to play, and my daughter plays for the sake of playing.

The autotelic quality of an activity, when it derives meaning from itself, is another essential component of an optimal experience. It allows children to stick to music practice week after week and year after year, while most adults quit soon after starting because their goals are different. Actually, children don’t even think in terms of goals; they just play.

…This makes me marvel once again at the depth of Nike’s “Just do it” slogan.

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Cinderella’s dreams

My six-year-old daughter is going surfing. With a considerable help from her mother, she is putting on a neoprene boot. It’s not an easy task, so she notes:

– You know, it’s just like “Cinderella”…

Then, she becomes lost in thought. My wife asks:

– What are you dreaming about?

– A prince. On a beautiful horse.

– …

I am starting to get a bit worried, so I ask:

– Why are you dreaming of a prince on a horse?

– I just love horses…

I feel better.

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Screwing up

My wife and I are putting together a shelf for art supplies. It’s a final stage of the assembly – only a few screws are left. Our six-year-old daughter walks in:

— Wow! You guys have done it! The shelf is almost finished. You just need to screwed it up!

It’s good when someone has confidence in you…

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The mushroom story

This weekend was incredibly packed with activities for my daughter, even considering her typically busy schedule. She played violin at a local festival, had two dance classes, and played golf – all in a single day. And then, the next day, we were back at the golf course for more practice – all because she had such a good time the day before with some fantastic mentors from our university golf team.

I am continually surprised at how easygoing my daughter is. I think her secret is that she naturally focusses on one thing at a time and enjoys it. She is definitely a good example for me in that respect. She even turns commuting into story time, by asking me and my wife to tell her stories from our childhood, sometimes retelling the stories that she heard many times before. She actually knows them so well that she asks to make sure that her favourite details are not omitted.

Lately, she has been asking for “the mushroom story.” Here it is.

When I was about five years old, I went to a summer resort with my grandparents. One morning, as we were walking in the forest, we found a huge, round, white mushroom on a log. It appeared there overnight after rain. We picked it and brought it to our condominium, where my grandfather and I turned the mushroom into a monster’s head with some charcoal and sticks. Then, we placed it on the edge of an open window and shot acorns at it from across the room using a slingshot that my grandfather made for me a few days earlier. I suspect that he retrospectively realized that giving a slingshot to a five-year-old was not a particularly responsible thing to do, because I had been shooting acorns at everything in sight since laying my hands on it. So having an actual target must have been a welcome development.

At some point, I had a direct hit that knocked the mushroom/head over the windowsill. Grandpa and I didn’t give it a second thought and went on to play some other game. Our condo was on the second floor, and soon there was a knock on our door. My grandmother opened it – it was the neighbour-lady from downstairs, and we heard that she said something to the extent that “your boy splashed some nasty green paint all over our window.” My grandmother said that it was not possible, because the boy had been under constant supervision of his grandfather, who was an exceedingly responsible gentleman. But the grandfather came out and said that he might have an idea of what had happened. And he went to see the aftermath for himself. It turned out that the mushroom that fell downstairs was full of bright green spores that exploded all over the neighbour’s window (in fact, completely covering it with green goo) when the mushroom hit the ground.

My daughter inevitably asks how it all ended, and she is visibly glad when I tell her that I did not get into a slightest bit of trouble. My grandfather cleaned up the mess himself, probably feeling the responsibility of not directing my playing into a less destructive direction.

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Justifying fun

In his auto-biographical “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”, Richard Feynman criticized physics textbooks of his day by saying that most examples in them were written by people, who never tried to replicate the problems as experiments (for example, to illustrate friction, one could have timed how long it would take a rolling ball to stop on different surfaces). When I first read it, I thought how much fun it would be to do things not for their potential value or impact, but simply for “the pleasure of finding things out”, as Feynman put it. But at the same time, I thought that it would be prohibitively impractical: who would be interested in a simple friction experiment that must have been done countless times before?

It is justification of trying and doing fun things that what I, and probably most other people, struggle with. Perhaps, one way to think about it is to somehow link the individual fun experiments into larger-scale projects. Perhaps, thinking about them as contributing to a “body of work“, e.g., learning a skill, developing a relationship with a child, etc.

Speaking about doing fun things with children, last week, I learned that a cheetah, my daughter’s favourite animal, can cover 7 m in a single stride. This came from the illustrated book called “Animal!” that she spent a lot of time with over the Spring break. As a side note, the photographs in that book and nothing short of amazing – quite inspiring. In the spirit of Feynman’s suggestion, we measured 7 m with a measuring tape, and it turned out that a cheat could jump across both our living and dining rooms at once! I must say that it is one thing to read about 7 meters in a book and another to see what it looks like in reality. Power of a physical demonstration in action!

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Keeping up with children

After spending a beautiful afternoon at the Butchart Gardens, my daughter wanted to go for a run/bike ride with me. We first did thins kind of thing last year in Milan. I would go running, and she would bike alongside. We would go from our apartment along Naviglio Martesana to a playground that was about 2.5 km away. That was about how far my daughter could pedal nonstop at that time. Today we did a solid 5k, almost without a word of complaining from her. Our average pace was still nothing to brag about, but I am not taking for granted that we can do this together at all. At some point, it is I who won’t be able to keep up and will be slowing her down. What are the chances that she would want to run with me then?

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Treats and rewards

I often thought about treats and rewards as interchangeable terms, but lately I’ve realized that they are quite different. Rewards imply expectation of a certain performance, and this makes me a bit uneasy, particularly in the parenting context. I think that developing a dependance on external approval, especially of performance rather than effort, can be counter-productive. It removes the sense of control and agency. For adults too (I am thinking about myself here), the expectation of a reward can substitute the original motivation for doing something.

On the other hand, a treat, in my mind, is something entirely positive. It is doing a pleasant thing for someone (or for oneself) simply because we want the person to feel good. There is no expectation that a treat has to be earned or that it is due regularly. Actually, I think that regular treats are good, but they have to different in nature from one another to avoid Hedonic adaptation to their positive effect.

With my daughter, I like celebrating seemingly insignificant milestones like the first day of a school term or the first day of vacation by doing something outside of our daily routine.

For myself, a change in activity is often a nice treat in itself. I think I somehow developed a pool of go-to treats that I can rotate and that I know would be good for me in general, like reading a non-technical book while eating lunch (my current one is the biography of Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson) or working on a personal photo project for a couple of hours a week.

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Things I like

One of the things I look forward to every week is waiting for my daughter while she goes to an art lesson after school. I sit at a cafe next door to the studio, and the one hour I have there feels like a bonus time to catch up on things that usually get crowded our of my day. I am glad that she is doing something that she enjoys and that, at the same time, I can work on something without the pressure to be productive.

Surprisingly, productivity takes care of itself, probably because I don’t rush to finish anything in particular and can actually think about what I am doing. I can think about the paper I’ve been reviewing and how it relates to my own research instead of rushing to finish and submit the review, as I often do in the office during “regular” work hours. Or I feel free to play with photos on my phone or computer to explore new processing techniques. Or I can read my own notes on the books that I’ve read in the past. Sometimes, I surprise myself with the ideas that I had at the time, but completely forgotten.

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Making something that lasts

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Back in high school, when I started going to the gym to lift weights regularly, a read a cautionary bit of advise in a magazine: motivation [for training] is easy to get, but difficult to maintain. This is true for practically everything, not just sports. But simply knowing this helps to prepare and compensate for flagging motivation.

One motivation-inducing concept that resonates for me personally is working on something that I think would last a long time. Actually, most things I do fall into this category: doing research and writing papers about it, teaching, drawing, photography. Playing with my daughter is there too.

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Tim Urban nicely described the concept of transcending time by raising children in his blog post about Elon Musk. Elon reportedly views people as computers, hardware being the physical body and brain and software being the things people learn throughout their lives. In this framework, our children are one-half of ourselves in terms of their hardware, and we have a unique opportunity to contribute to development of their software by spending time with them.

Interestingly, this mind trick of convincing myself that I am working on something potentially long-lasting doesn’t work for personal development things, sports included. Old Japanese kendo sensei like asking novices, especially foreigners, “Why did you begin practicing kendo?” I think a more difficult question would be: “Why do you continuing practicing?” For me, habits really help here. Often, I go to practice simply because I’ve been doing for a long time. And then, another truism kicks in: motivation follows action.

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Habits are also dangerous, of course. if you do something mindlessly long enough, you lose the sight of what made you start in the first place. With lifting weights, I had exactly that experience a few years ago. What helped me shake this off was the fact that I injured my back and could not do my regular exercises. At that time, we were on vacation in Venice Beach, staying at an Airbnb for the first time. The place was owned by a young lady, who had lots of books on healthy lifestyle, fitness, etc. I must be in California after all, I thought. Also, the nearby Muscle Beach was bit of a holy land for me, because of it’s association with Arnold Schwarzenegger, my childhood hero. So I saw all the people, from muscleheads hanging out in the gym to wannabe Hollywood starlets shopping for healthy foods at the local supermarket, who were so different, but for whom dedication to physical training was obviously a core trait. I didn’t find any role models there per se, but I my motivation to thoughtfully train and a sense of fun of daily exercise was definitely renewed.

Perhaps, I need watch more kendo videos on YouTube or go through my favourite samurai movies?

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