I wanted to explain a pattern I’ve noticed all my life, because with each passing year, it proves more true and useful. Maybe this helps someone learn more efficiently, or understand why their current habits aren’t working.
The nugget of wisdom is this: when learning something, it’s basically a guarantee that you’ll flip-flop between two possible extremes before settling on the perfect balance.
I think there’s just no way around it. Any skill, any topic, has two extremes. Too little versus Too much. Too quickly versus Too slowly. Too simple versus Too complicated. And whatever you learn, you’ll reach one of those extremes at some point, which makes you turn back towards the other extreme. You need to see both of them before you can find the right balance.
For example, when writing, many people start out writing too simply. Repetitive sentences, always the same structure, reusing the same few common words. Maybe you’re one of those people who thinks a period can be used when it should be a comma instead.
Once you’ve written a few stories and realize this mistake, you probably start writing a bit more “complicated”. You write longer sentences. You go out of your way to invent new phrasings for simple things, and the thesaurus is always at hand to give you twenty synonyms for every word. As expected, now you’ve hit the other extreme.
Upon reaching it, you finally realize the balance. Because you’ve seen both extremes: you know, from experience, when simple words are the right way to go, and you know when a longer sentence would be nice. You’ve gone through both extremes—too simplistic and too complicated—and will find your middle ground.
Why do I believe this is the path of basically anyone, trying to learn any skill?
Because the example I gave above … could be given in reverse for everyone else!
Writers who come from a background of reading a lot start at the other extreme. They’ve read their Lord of the Rings, their classics, their literature far above their age group, and so they believe they should be writing these long poetic sentences. I was one of those people. My first stories had sentences that were so long they were basically an entire paragraph on their own. I was not even 10 years old at the time. My parents tried to read my work, but commented it was just too exhausting after page one.
Once I realized this, I started writing more simply. For years I upheld this mantra of “shorten everything! everything could be simpler!” It taught me a lot about how to simplify sentences and streamline writing. But, as you expect, I now hit the other extreme. I wrote one or two stories at that time that barely had a sentence over five words. I was too afraid to use any word with more than three syllables, and it made all my stories read like they were a child’s first ever bedtime story.
After hitting both extremes, I could finally see the balance. My writing started picking its moments for longer and more complicated sentences, but kept things simple where needed. I feel that, especially the past ~2 years, I have found this balance.
Hitting both extremes, in laughably obvious ways (in hindsight), was necessary to get there.
And this has been the case for every skill I’ve learned, and every skill I’ve seen someone else learn. I think you must be exceptionally talented and lucky to not have to take this journey. To somehow hit the sweet spot on your first try, recognize it’s the sweet spot, and repeat that formula for the rest of your life. For everyone else: you start near one extreme and visit it first, then you learn and visit the other extreme, and then you’ll have found the right balance.
Teaching myself how to play the piano? I started out smashing the piano in a forced way, playing the same few chords over and over. At some point, I recorded that, which was necessary to make me realize how stilted and stupid it sounded. So I started practicing left hand patterns, learning the most obscure of chords, and improving my skills that way. Until I recorded myself, years later, and though it sounded messy. I couldn’t hear the main melody because my left hand was going insane! I realized I’d hit the other extreme, and I backed off a bit. Since then, I feel like I can intuitively decide how complicated the playing of my left hand should be to support the right hand (melody).
Teaching myself how to draw? I started out drawing only the most basic of stick figures. Cartoony things made from basic shapes, which used only the handful of colors that I knew fit together. At some point, I wasn’t improving anymore and everything I made looked childish and mediocre. I had hit extreme simplicity and basic drawings. (My mother’s remarks boiled down to: “oh yes, a very … minimalist drawing, Tiamo!”) So I challenged myself and created several professional picture books. Detailed drawings, texture, shadows, lots of effort into a single page. It taught me a lot … and also that it was overkill, and a time sink, and just not necessary for most of what I want to illustrate. And so, after hitting both extremes, I finally settled on a style that’s quite simple and efficient, but also a bit more detailed and rich than what an amateur would do.
Teaching myself how to program? I started out writing messy code using the few keywords I knew. After some years, I learned all the extra tricks a computer can do and wrote really smart and efficient code architectures. Until I discovered those were complete overkill for 99% of my projects and found my middle ground. Some parts of my code are really clean, efficient, “clever”. Other parts of my code are a blob of very basic code that “does the job”. I’ve shipped games that sold this way, and I know most (somewhat successful/productive) programmers do.
The list goes on and on. You naturally start close to one extreme of a skill, which is why you visit that first. Repeating that extreme over and over shows you, often very clearly and stupidly, why it’s an extreme and why it creates problems. So you come up with the fix, and apply it over and over and over … until you hit the other extreme.
And now, because you’ve seen the two possible ways in which you can go too far, you can find the perfect middle ground.
I thought this would be a longer article, but I’ve really said all there is too say. I just think it would benefit people to realize this pattern. To realize this is what learning looks like, 99% of the time. I want people to not give up when they hit that first extreme, or the second one. Yes, your work looks bad in the moment. You might feel like you’ve wasted all this time and effort just to get in a different bad place. But the fact you can recognize it as a bad place now is the vital part that will immediately make you level up.
And I, of course, hope that parents and teachers realize this too. It pains me to see parents scold or redirect their children simply because they aren’t amazing at something right now. To see school slap a grade on someone and tell them they “haven’t learned hard enough” or, even worse, “math just isn’t your thing, why don’t you focus on something else?” Failing to give the right answer at this moment, or understanding some subject in completely the wrong way, is the first step to learning and great understanding later.
There is this belief that most skills are simply talent or luck, and it’s just not true. Every successful artist has a looong row of failed projects behind them. And it usually shows both extremes—paintings too simple, paintings too complicated, stories too simple, stories too complicated, music too messy, music too boring—as both are necessary for finding that middle ground.
Now go forth and continue learning,
Tiamo