Peter Hosey

here's a little thing ppl never tell you, but is true. you can actually stop doing any creative process, cold turkey, for years at a time; pick it back up later on, and find that you have progressed in your skill level. seriously only because you have experienced. you have witnessed. you have observed. and, through all of that, you have aged. just by existing you have gained so much additional knowledge, skill, and information that you would not have thought possible.

sure, it may not be a massive jump in skill or quality, obviously parts of you will be "out of practice" if you aren't working the muscle memory. but it's these observations, hidden chunks of knowledge, and your life experiences that contribute to the greater act of creating over a longer period of time.

i know this because i am someone who serially picks up and puts down hobbies over a VERY long stretch of time (not just years! decades!), and someone who actively hates practicing, conditioning, drills or anything that requires me to do something for the rote "betterment" of the craft. without having done much of that at all, i still have noticed this every single time, in every single creative hobby i've picked back up. and sometimes it's not like, a directly transferable "Better" result, but it's using information i wasn't consciously thinking of before, or knowing some part of myself better.

i think this is probably my favorite antidote to the fear of aging i've come across yet. now that i've found this out i can't wait to see what i create with the rest of the years i have left. it's so exciting to think that maybe my best work is still ahead of me. and i don't care how long it takes.

I think another part of this is that the knowledge that you gained during active practice takes time and rest to knit together into comprehension.

There's a story I've told before about the time I woke up understanding the vi text editor. And I literally mean I woke up understanding it. Lying in bed, eyes just opened, struck by the realization that I now understood vi's model.

(Up until that point I had been an emacs user—not an advanced one, but it was close enough to GUI text editors that I could do basic tasks.)

I got up, went to the computer, started up vi for the first time in months, and proved that my new understanding was correct.

I had previously tried to learn vi, of course, but it made no sense to me then. I have no reason to believe that continuing to bang my head against it would have resulted in any progress. Giving up was necessary for me to figure it out, because the time after that, in which I did not actively think about it, was the time in which what I had learned knitted together into understanding.

The same happens on a smaller scale all the time when we are stuck on a problem and get up for a snack or bio break and the solution or another thing to try dawns on us. I think it's more commonly accepted, at least in programmer circles, that that's to be expected; a lot of us use that tool on a fairly frequent basis (whether deliberately or because nature always calls sooner or later). But it works on longer time-scales, too.

when you start failing something, making a mistake, etc, it's worth paying attention to it and getting the most learning you can out of it -- it's doomed to fail, but you might not be.

most of my important learned things were from paying attention to everything burning down.

but if you see failure as world-ending or a slight on you or whatever, you're likely to black-hole it instead of learning from it. it's a hard skill to develop if you're constantly in that state, but one of the most impactful ways out of it, too.

'Failing Mindfully' might be the way I have to try explaining this to people, because there is nothing that drives me as immediately feral as that line. "I did exactly what you did and I didn't get the same result. It didn't work."

Well... okay. So what's the learning opportunity here? If the process failed, where and how? Are you examining that and looking for solutions, or are you throwing up your hands and declaring that some magic third force in the universe is deliberately messing with you?

If you look at my process and my results and perform exactly the same method and you don't get the same result, then are you looking at your equipment? Where's the weak link? There's always something to learn from failure, if you're prepared to accept it as something other than a something happening to you like the universe hates you.

Of course, this doesn't cover the chaotic and unfeeling nature of the universe and how bad things can just happen, but in the scope of attempting something under your own recognizance - especially a game, hobby or similar - the phrase "I did it right and it didn't work" is such a blithe thought-terminating cliché that I damn near hit the roof every time I see it.

This isn't entirely what OP was driving at, but it feels related enough to take the opportunity to shake my fist and remind people about learning opportunities being almost anywhere you cock something up.

I feel like fixed vs. growth mindset is part of this.

For those who've never heard of it, a “fixed mindset” is the idea that skills are innate and fixed: you either are or aren't good at something; you are or aren't a “math person”, say. “Growth mindset” is the idea that skills can be developed, and even if you're not good at it yet, you can get better at it through learning and practice. This dichotomy was articulated by psychologist Carol Dweck.

Someone with fixed mindset sees failure—especially failure in their earliest attempts, before any demonstrable skill has been developed—as the indication that This Is Not For Me. Someone with growth mindset sees failure as an indication to reassess the circumstances, methods, and even goals—to attempt to learn. “I can't do this” vs. “I don't know how to do this yet”.

Someone with fixed mindset sees “I tried what they suggested and it didn't work” as an indication that it will work for them, but not for me. They are able to do this; I am not. Someone with growth mindset sees “I tried what they suggested and it didn't work” as a prompt for further examination: I thought I tried what they suggested; did I do it right? What was different between what I did and what they (presumably) had previously done? (Had they done it before or were they spitballing?) Was something different in the environment in which the steps were performed?

Of course, nobody's all one or all the other; we all exhibit a mix of both at times, and it is possible to work away from one towards the other. The more you practice a growth mindset, the more you'll acquire skills you might once have thought impossible for you.