Things aren’t hard or easy — they just *are*

I’ve been studying guitar for almost two years now (classical for 1.75 years) and Mandarin Chinese for about seven months, and one bad habit I’m fighting is thinking that I’m trying to learn something “hard.” My guitar teacher specifically called me out on this and suggested that if I believe something will be difficult ahead of time, it will be. He has a point.

It’s natural to want to label something as “hard” or “easy,” but the deeper I get into my studies, the more irrelevant the question is. Hard for whom? Easy for whom? And does it even matter?

Labelling something as “hard” or “easy” gets in the way of actually doing the work in front of us. If we approach a task thinking ahead of time that it will be hard, procrastination sets in because we generally don’t enjoy doing hard things. On the other hand, if we expect something to be easy, we’ll get discouraged the moment it gets challenging. In both cases, we’re not focusing on the work on front of us as it is. Instead, we’re attaching expectations to it and measuring our experience to those expectations.

It’s a great way to waste a lot of energy.

It’s taken a while, but I’ve learned to let go of expectations and simply focus on practicing. It forces me to stay in the present with an open heart and enjoy each moment as it happens. Both my guitar practice and my language practice are a lot more enjoyable these days. I’m making progress too, and since I don’t have any specific time-based goals, any improvement makes me happy.

I want to bring this attitude into my writing practice as well, but it’s been more difficult because I have more mental baggage attached to writing. At least now I have better tools and more experience on how to deal with it.

Less pressure, more joy

“Stop trying to win at your hobbies.”

from The Practice of Groundedness by Brad Stulberg

I’ve been experimenting with productivity hacks for a long time, all the way back to my college years when the Franklin planner (remember those?) were a thing. These days, I wonder whether my productivity quest is doing more harm than good.

On the writing side, tracking word counts, page counts, writing speed, or time in the chair has never lasted longer than two months. On the music side, tracking practice time has lasted longer, but I sense it’s outlived its usefulness. It’s like the creative side of me constantly rebels against any kind of structure I impose on it. Plus there’s the question of whether to count certain things. Do I turn on my timer when I experiment with guitar pieces that aren’t assigned by my teacher? How about noodling on the couch and discovering new chords? Or when I practice my electric guitar instead of my classical one? What If I want to just pick up my guitar for ten minutes and try to play something from memory? Is that “practice” and do I have to stop and set the timer before I start?

When I knit, I don’t encounter these problems. I know there are people out there who track how many yards or grams of yarn they use up, set production goals, and beat themselves up when they miss them. I don’t do any of that, yet I finish plenty of projects without all that tracking because I enjoy the process. I tried to track my knitting for a few weeks and it sucked all the joy out of it, plus I ended up knitting less.

Similarly, I’ve somehow managed to eat a vegan diet for years without tracking how many days I’ve been doing it. Same with not drinking alcohol. Funny how the things I don’t track are the things that successfully become habits. Hmmm….

Maybe I should apply that relaxed mindset to my writing and my music too. To tell you the truth, I’m afraid to because all the “experts” say it leads to laziness. It goes against so much of the conventional wisdom out there. but conventional wisdom has not helped my productivity or my attitude at all. It makes what should be fun feel too much like work.

My guitar teacher isn’t one of those “track all your practice time” people. Instead, he encourages me to use the timer only as a way to guide focused practice chunks. For example, if I’m having trouble with a particular chord change, he advises setting the timer for 5 minutes and focusing intensely on identifying where the problems with that change are, what my body/arm/hand/fingers are doing, and how I can make my movements more efficient, relaxed, and accurate. He also explicitly told me NOT to track my time practicing electric guitar and just enjoy learning it, which I found interesting. I suspect it’s because he knows that when you only track time in the practice room, you’re tracking the wrong thing. Wiggling your fingers by rote for 4 hours isn’t the same as practicing with focused insight for 1.

So now I’m experimenting with loosening up and not tracking so much. I’m not a business manager monitoring KPIs on a dashboard, and I’ve spent too many years as an attorney billing my time in 6 minute increments. Creative pursuits are supposed to be enjoyable, and treating them like work apparently makes me wants to avoid them. I shouldn’t be surprised by that.

I don’t know if getting rid of metrics will improve anything, but at least I won’t beat myself so much anymore. Beating myself up over not “succeeding” in my hobbies — how ridiculous is that?

Interesting link: The mash-up I didn’t know I needed: a Bad Lip Reading version of Hamilton. Don’t drink beverages while watching!

My 2023 theme: UNplug and play

Airplane mode is not just a setting on your phone. It can be a whole way of life.


Austin Kleon

I waste too much time online, which is odd because I haven’t had a social media account since 2015. That doesn’t stop me from spending tons of time searching, scrolling, lurking, and overloading my brain with information of dubious quality, though. It usually starts innocently enough, when I need to look up a specific thing. But after finding the answer I’m looking for and studying it from every opinion and angle, no matter how trivial, an hour has passed and I find myself in yet another rabbit hole.

It’s the curse of the infinite scroll combined with the brain’s desire for novelty. I’ve had this problem even before social media came along. What can I say? I love learning new things. But do I really need to spend two hours researching a $20 purchase? Do I really need to read everyone’s opinion about the outrage of the day (or the hour)? Do I need questionable advice from internet strangers about my life decisions? Of course not.

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot less time online, even going as far as blocking search engines from my browser and using the internet only for necessary tasks like email at specific times of the day and checking the weather. Those are the days when I feel most like myself, which doesn’t say good things about how the internet affects me.

This year, I want to be even more intentional about staying offline. I know my online habits have stolen far too much energy from things that are more important and rewarding but, like any real-life activity, more difficult to implement. I want to cement my guitar and writing practices, for starters. I want to get outside, be more physically active, and explore my community. I want to spend more time with family and friends. These are such simple, healthy things, yet it’s so easy to be pulled away by all the forces (marketers, media, politicians, etc.) that want to impose their vision of the world on me. It’s annoying and disrespectful and I’m sick of it. Attention is even more valuable than money, and it’s about time I treated it that way.

So “unplug and play” is my theme for 2023. It’s a simple one, but it’ll have a positive domino effect on other areas of my life.

This month’s link: When I vist the Asian grocery store, I always get a kick out of seeing the odd English on labels and gift items. Duolingo recently showcased great examples of Japanese-to-English mistranslations in The Museum of Wonky English.