The Pearl: Courage and Skill
Written by Martin Vidal | 08/22/2021
Food for Thought:
I’ve always felt nervous about making my writing public. This experience is typical for writers. I wanted to explore if that feeling was warranted. What I found was a lot of reasons why it’s truly daunting to engage in the sort of permanent, public expression it takes to share your writing with the world. Whether you like to write yourself, or just as a reader, I hope this piece will help you gain a deeper appreciation for the emotional realities faced by writers and why.
Read it here.
Personal Development:
Rapid Skill Acquisition
Research shows that it takes about 10,000 hours of focused practice to achieve expert-level competence in a given field. Rapid skill acquisition instead focuses on how quickly one can go from zero experience to a functional grasp of a skill. This might mean learning to play one song on the guitar, or achieving basic fluency in a language. It has been shown that feats like these can be accomplished in only 20 hours of practice!
There’s a lot of methodology underlying rapid skill acquisition, but the basics are to deconstruct the skill into subskills and target them with consistent practice sessions, separated by “spaced repetition.” For example, if learning to play guitar, you want to focus some time specifically on memorizing the notes on the fretboard, then chord progression for a song, and then timing. By narrowing the field of study, we focus our effort and retention on a specific subskill. This streamlines the process into an ordered progression. Once we’ve learned the necessary subskills, it’s only a matter of creating a composite of them, making for the skill in its entirety.
Consistent practice and “spaced repetition” are memorization techniques that allow us to retain and reinforce our memories. You should allow for some space between practice sessions but not too much—perhaps a few days before practicing the same subskill and one day between different subskills—and, as always, continued repetition is key.
For more on rapid skill acquisition, check out The First 20 Hours by Walter Kaufman.
Book Quotes:
“Happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (p. 5)
“But that’s just the aim of civilization—to make everything a source of enjoyment.” (p. 36)
“...in all human sorrows nothing gives comfort but love and faith...” (p. 207)
“Those joys were so small that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand, and at bad moments she could see nothing but the pain, nothing but sand; but there were good moments too when she saw nothing but the joy, nothing but gold.” (p. 245)
“Misfortunes never come singly...” (p. 339)
“And do you know, there’s less charm in life, when one thinks of death, but there’s more peace.” (p. 351)
“There are no conditions to which a man cannot become used, especially if he sees that all around him are living in the same way.” (p. 651)
“And where love ends, hate begins.” (p. 702)
“In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble-organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that bubble is Me.” (p. 729)
You can find the full book here.
A Song I Love:
This week’s song is “The Hearse” by Mustafa. Mustafa’s album, “When Smoke Rises,” is the most powerful and beautiful album I’ve come across this year. It took strenuous deliberation to narrow down the recommendation from this album to a single song. “The Hearse” has an almost jarring originality, achieved by inserting themes dealing with gang violence, typical of perhaps gangster rap, into a musical composition usually found in a slow, sorrowful love song. The musicality is sublime: a quietly seductive instrumental backgrounds Mustafa’s voice, which is itself textured perfectly to capture the intense emotionality of the lyrics. Still, the lyrics are absolutely the superlative element:
“I didn’t wanna risk it all/
Oh, I know what’s at stake/
But you made yourself special/
I wanna throw my life away for you”
“Full speed on any street, I won’t take a break to you/
My patience and my peace, I’ll feel all the rage for you.”
Listen to it here.
A Tiny Thought:
Emotions ensure the mind is never too free.
Until next week,
Martin Vidal
Author of The Ambition Handbook and Flower Garden
Website: www.martinvidal.co