Learning to fall
A style of youtube skateboard videos, is to show someone attempting a trick, to fail over and over, often with repeated falling to the ground, until finally succeeding, and with that success come the end of the video. What a casual observer may not know, is that pavement hurts. And yet, here are these guys (really, mostly guys), that seem to be happy to torture themselves, over and over. A few years ago, one of my favorite expressions was “no pain, no gain”. I would work around the clock, I would “take the crap”, and I would optimistically suffer. I still do that! But I do not say “no pain, no gain” anymore. Instead I have come to understand that certain forms of learning are mostly about managing failures while pursuing those potential gains. In some sense, learning is like a game of poker: you need to pay to stay in the game, and that hurts, yet you expect to make that back when you win. And so it is with certain areas of learning, like when learning skateboard tricks o...