It's just like going to the gym bro
There are few sights more tragic than the self improvement bro who tries to self-improve his social skills through consistent daily practice. Like a woodpecker trying to build its nest in a telephone pole, he bangs the only tool he knows against a problem that it is completely unsuited to. “It’s just like going to the gym” he says with uncanny valley eye contact, “if you just put in an hour of practice every day you’ll get better”.
People love saying learning any skill is “just like going to the gym”. There's this nice thing with going to the gym and lifting weights where, if you do it regularly you get stronger, and the degree to which you get stronger is pretty proportional to how much you do it. This fits with a just-world idea of how skills should work, and so it’s the go to example of self improvement through discipline in general.
It has lots of other nice properties too. You have to do it consistently (a few times a week) but only for a fairly short amount of time each day (~1 hour); you can’t feel a moment of divine inspiration and pull a 12 hour weightlifting session to get your whole month’s gains. It’s quite hard and unpleasant, to the point where many try and fail, but not so unpleasant that you actually have a good excuse not to do it. It doesn’t require any coordination with others, doesn’t limit your ability to do other things, nor is it particularly expensive, so anyone can fit it into their lifestyle easily. It’s also pretty insensitive to how you perform on any particular day, you can have the occasional off day and as long as you show up you’ll still get results. I could go on. It really is a very very good example of self improvement through discipline.
Most things aren’t like this! The fact that it’s such a good example is the very reason you shouldn’t assume that other skills are the same.
There is a fairly weak reason to believe that skills might be like this. Namely that the brain/body has some capacity to adapt, and so will try to get better at things you subject it to. Ok fine but you can’t adapt to everything, even among purely physical traits going to the gym is an outlier. You can’t get any taller by stretching every morning, you can’t become better looking by pulling your face into a less dumpy shape for 30 minutes a day, you can’t make your neck longer by reaching for the extra high branches.
But when it comes to a skill™ the default assumption is that it’s pretty much like the going-to-the-gym case and not at all like the making-yourself-taller case. This is silly. Also it can be completely unlike either of these things. Not everything is a thinly veiled nature vs nurture tradeoff (or luck!).
Here are some other ways skills can be, apart from like going to the gym:
It can be like playing in the NBA
You probably couldn’t play in the NBA because you lack intrinsic attributes that make people good athletes. In this case height is the obvious one but one would expect that in all sports the people at the very top have some natural advantage.
That’s ok you can’t have everything in life. It’s good to recognise that this is a possibility so you can notice when you’re putting a lot of effort into something and still not performing at a level you are happy with, or getting any better. At this point it might be time to give up, or at least give up on trying to get better.
It can be like being on a hot streak in poker
Even if the outcome is random, you can convince yourself that practice makes perfect. Gambling addicts often think they have a System, and believe they’re improving their skills when things are going well, and need to try harder when things are going badly. To be fair in this case specifically it does seem easy to avoid this by simply pulling yourself together.
This can happen in more subtle ways however. When you hit on a good meme format on twitter dot com, the first few times you use it people like it more and more, so it appears you’re getting wittier and wittier. This keeps going until everyone gets sick of it, and it turns out it was just one random event (coming up with the original meme), followed by the natural cycle of all things.
…alright that nature, nurture, and luck taken care of. What else is there?
It can be like playing in the NBA (peak performance edition)
“We’re talking about practice, not a game. Not the game that I go out there and die for, and play every game like it’s my last. Not the game. We’re talking about practice man, I mean how silly is that?” – Allan Iverson
Apart from the natural ability thing, a feature of sports is that it’s not enough to practice, you have to actually perform on a specific day. This is importantly different to going to the gym where you just gradually get stronger over time.
Lots of skills involve an element of peak performance. The simplest example that most people experience is taking exams. You can put a lot of work into studying (and it helps, a lot!) but there comes a day where you actually have to perform in a short period of time, and it matters a lot how you do. You can completely mess up at this point just by not trying hard enough or losing your composure.
It can be like writing a great novel
There aren't many prodigies in novel-writing, most authors of one of the great classics were already quite old when they wrote it. This is unlike many of the more going-to-the-gym-like skills like playing the violin or solving a Rubik's cube, in which slightly autistic 12 year olds are often at the very cutting edge.
I claim this is because the skill of writing a great novel is mainly about translating your life experience into something that other people will understand and relate to, and (mainly) not about actually putting the sentences together in a skillful way.
By the time he published Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky had already been mock executed, spent four years exiled in Siberia, and had his first wife die of tuberculosis. And it really shows. It's hard to imagine a tech bro achieving the same thing by putting in 2 hours of daily writing practice before work every day.
Most skills don't require a whole lifetime spent examining the depth of the human condition, but many do require some experience from some other area.
It can be like learning to draw
Part of the going to the gym thing is the idea that it’s not about thinking really hard or being really clever, it’s just about churning out the reps of whatever you’re doing. But lots of things actually do benefit a lot from thinking really hard and trying to be clever, and don’t benefit that much from rote practice.
Learning to draw is probably one of those things. To quote Lulie:
If you draw 1000 pictures you're not going to get a fraction as good as if you studied 1000 paintings (or scenes). That's because you can practise errors.
…
How I learnt to draw:
1. Drew a person and got feedback from artist friends. Sense of my baseline / what I didn’t know.
2. Read an art forum critique centre, wrote crits too (learnt how to identify mistakes)
3. Read tutorials obsessively to understand what else I didn’t know.
I hardly ever draw.
I can happily read art tutorial books all day. And then read the crit forums to see the kind of misconceptions budding artists have.
If I then drew at the end of such a day, I would just be better.
It’s not magic, it’s just what learning stuff does.
I can’t draw so I can’t corroborate this, but some further evidence is that medieval art all looked terrible until someone worked out perspective. Presumably the medieval artists had a lot of practice and it didn’t help them.
Practice is compelling because you can just force yourself to do it for an hour no matter how little you want to, it’s a testament to your force of will to do so. Thinking about things is much harder. Looking stuff up even more so. You have to care at least a little bit about what you’re trying to do.
There’s this slightly snobby idea about education, which is that students who just grind away on examples come away with a shallow and unrounded understanding of the world, and it’s the ones with their heads in the clouds who really get it. I think this is basically right, and it’s unfairly maligned.
When I was at university I hardly ever sat down to work, but I did mull things over a lot. When I couldn’t make sense of something it would bother me all day until I worked it out. And if I couldn’t work it out I would comb through different textbooks until I found an explanation that made sense. This mostly didn’t look or feel like studying really hard, it more resembled lounging around all day like the protagonist of a Jane Austen novel and then occasionally spending 10 minutes scrolling through pdfs. Nevertheless it worked and I feel like I now understand a lot about electromagnetism and so on.
Sometimes I try to muster up this same attitude for some little skill I’m trying to learn, like cooking or playing the guitar. But I quickly realise that I just don’t have it in me. My mulling over time is already taken up with other stuff that I’m more interested in, I am destined to be at best a mediocre cook or guitar player, even if I do grind out the practice.
It can be like chopping wood or carrying water
Lots of things that are framed as skills can be better framed as just “doing stuff”. When you drive to work every morning you’re not doing so to get better at driving, and you’re not getting better at driving. You’re just executing a skill you already have in order to get on with your life. Most things are like this.
Framing things as skill building can be a way to cope with the apparent futility of it all. People argue sending kids to school every day is good because it “teaches them how to show up on time” or something. But showing up on time is not a skill, it’s just doing a specific boring thing. If you can tell the time you can show up on time. The reason the kids don’t do it is because it’s unpleasant and they want to be somewhere else, not because they can’t tell the time.
You might be tempted to say that “tolerating unpleasantness” or “discipline” was the real skill they were learning, to which I say “eh 🤷, maybe, probably not”.
The upside of the skill-building framing is that maybe there is some meta-skill like tolerating unpleasantness that you’re really learning, and the framing motivates you to really learn it. The downside is that there may not be, and then you’re just tolerating a load of unpleasantness for no reason. In the school case you would think that after 14 years of showing-up-on-time training every adult would arrive to every work and social event with absolute military precision. But they don’t, they mosy in at their own leisure, for the same reason that kids are late to school, because they were busy doing something else or they couldn’t be bothered.
The “doing stuff” framing can be a weight off your shoulders. If you have “poor organisational skills” that you’re “trying to improve” then every time you need to tidy your house it becomes a referendum on the your entire state of your personality development. If you leave it a bit too long one time you have to come up with some explanation for why, and how you can improve your system so it doesn’t happen again. But really it’s just cleaning your house. Sometimes you’re on top of it and sometimes you get a bit behind, it’s not important. The reason you do it any specific time is just so your house is clean. You’re probably not going to get way better or worse at it before you die.
Let’s return now to our humble self improvement bro with the poor social skills. Suppose it’s 5 years later and he has been putting in the work every day. He’s been hitting up the open mic every Wednesday evening, hitting on girls at bars on the weekend, and making sure to regale acquaintances with dazzling anecdotes. Suppose it’s worked out for him, he now has a vibrant group of friends and a loving wife, this makes him very happy.
Now suppose he loses it all somehow, let’s say he’s the sole survivor of a tragic bus crash on the way to a pickleball tournament.
After an appropriate period of mourning he decides to start putting himself out there again. His old haunts bring back too many painful memories, so he doesn’t return to them, he starts over, moves to a whole new city even. He finds that without his face being familiar people aren’t as receptive to him, he feels shy and awkward again, people don’t find his jokes quite as funny or his anecdotes quite as charming.
He sticks at it though and after a period of time his life is back to how it was before, he has his nice cozy friend group and a loving partner, and he appreciates it all the more the second time round. Let’s say it takes 6 years this time; did he ever improve his social skills? Does it matter?