Magic Words Part 1: “Yet”

Most of my private students are adults. I greatly respect the humbling impulse to turn ourselves—grown-ass humans—into learners again. In some ways, the process of growing into an adult is the process of refining our focus only to those things we do best. It is both terrifying and beneficial to see who we are when we try the things we don’t do well; it’s like world travel for the intellectual self.One of the primary differences between children and adults as learners is adults’ Embarrassment of Not Knowing. Kids know that they don’t know. Their entire life is structured around the full-time job of being instructed.

Adults, who have crafted an existence specifically around their areas of comfort and expertise, often feel that a task they cannot do is a referendum on who they are.

My adult students say the word should so often that on my first day of instruction I point to a particular spot on the wall and tell them that an imaginary sign with a red line through that word hangs there. I point to the sign with every “should” the student tortures him-/her-/themself with, which—spoiler alert—no, they definitely should not, and would never be expected to. Within a couple of lessons, students just point to the spot themselves when they utter the dreaded word, which is a minor victory. But you can tell they still think they “should” play faster or learn quicker or already know a piece they’ve never seen or heard of before.

Two of my other imaginary signs come from teachers from my own children’s earliest school years—like “Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” but with occasional cussing. I will talk about one of these today and one next month.

This month’s word comes from the kids’ elementary school counselor. It is simple, small, and psychologically potent: YET.

People think that music is magic—either you have it or you don’t. And the effect of music is indeed something like magic. As Bob Brozman put it: “The neurobiology of playing a musical instrument is completely scientific, but it’s also an absolute miracle. You’re taking basically a calcium bucket filled with salt-water that’s run by a weak electrical signal, and you’re using it to move your flesh around in order to manipulate an instrument that disturbs air molecules between you and the listener, and then the listener’s ears pick up those disturbed air molecules, which generates a weak electrical signal to their calcium bucket full of salt water, and they feel a feeling. That’s miraculous.”

But learning the causes of music? The procedures for operating a weird, specialized Enlightenment Era machine with its contrived series of codes and secret handshakes and arbitrary motions that have almost no analogies to any other activities or objects anywhere else in our lives? And then becoming proficient enough to manipulate that bizarre contraption so freely and at will that you can use it in a way that the result completely obscures the existence of any mechanism? It’s a drag, man! It’s a whole series of non-intuitive interfaces using synaptic pathways and conceptual connections we’ve never had to use before. Our only option for improvement at every stage, from our first encounter to our last performance, is doing over again something we just finished not doing well. Talk about disincentives! It’s the psychological counterpart to, “This tastes terrible. Try it!”

In pursuit of the calcium-bucket challenge—at every stage—repetition is its own end. Even at the peak of our abilities, the best we can hope for is that the next mistakes we make are different from the last ones.

But here’s the thing. Our brains are powerful and lazy computers. They don’t like to have to think about tasks they are going to do often. They need that working memory, that RAM, for the new and unexpected. So as soon as we encounter a task or skill we know is going to be needed again, we go about encoding into automatic memory. That’s why you don’t have to think about how the bunny runs around the tree every time you tie your shoelaces. That deeply contrived set of motions becomes so second-nature that we would be hard-pressed even to describe it if we weren’t in the middle of doing it. We do improve, even when faced with maximally arbitrary procedures. Doing is improving.

So, when you’re undertaking the humbling task of learning how to operate an Enlightenment Era Torture machine, you’re not getting things wrong. You’re just not getting things right—YET. You are slowly but surely stocking your brain with more and more automatic-memory fodder. More important, perhaps, you are getting better and better at learning what not to do, which is most of the battle when your particular Enlightenment Era Torture Device involves putting sound that you yourself can hear into the air.

There is a quote by Thomas Edison, often attributed to his work on incandescent light bulbs but actually related to his later work on storage batteries. Edison’s friend and associate Walter S. Mallory asked Edison, ”Isn’t it a shame that with the tremendous amount of work you have done you haven’t been able to get any results?” Edison turned on Mallory “like a flash, and with a smile replied: ‘Results! Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work!’” (Edison. His Life and Inventions, 1910)

Edison was a believer in “yet.”

As kids, we live in an almost eternal “yet.” We understand our place in the flow of time. Everything is new. We do not expect to be good at something we never even knew existed before. We understand that eventually we end up as people who know things that we, as children, didn’t even know there was to learn. Kids live in “BY” —Before Yet.

We adults live in “AY”—After Yet. Or rather, we think we do. In fact, our brains crave input; we just forget how it feels not to know something yet. Just because we potentially can do something, doesn’t mean we already should be doing it.

In fact, when we learn a new skill as an adult, if anything we should not be good at it. Only a crazy person or the Douchebag Inside Your Head would think someone who has never done something, would do it as well as someone who has done it even once, let alone for years.

This month’s unsolicited advice, inspired by an elementary school counselor but perhaps more apt for adults than kids, is to remember: It’s not that you can’t do it. It’s just that you’re not doing it YET.

Next month: “The Beautiful Oops.”

Is there something I should offer unsolicited advice about in future columns? Shoot me a line via the contact form at joshweinstein.com and let me know.