Do it without learning, learn when you get stuck
There are two ways to learn anything:
- Learn the theory, then make it.
- Start making it, then go looking for theory when you hit a wall.
I prefer the second one. Mostly because I have been following the first way for all of my life, and it hasn’t worked great.
The problem with learning theory first is that it trains you to find flaws in your work before your work exists. It teaches you abstractions you have no capacity to relate with. It has you critique masterpieces you do not have the skills to make. It hands you best practices that become a perfectionistic expectation before you have written a page. It is crippling, like my formal education was. It makes you too conscious of your own limitations, and keeps you in a semi-competence zone, which I believe is the worst place to stand if you want to create anything real.
The second way is kinder, at least in the beginning, which is when you need kindness the most. Before semi-competence there is dumbness. Dumb fear, but also dumb confidence. You do not know what you do not know. You are free to believe you can paint a Mona Lisa or write a Crime and Punishment, which I honestly prefer. It gives me the courage to dream about making things I do not yet have the capacity to make. And capacity builds when you keep showing up.
That is exactly what happened. I started writing a book this year because I was too stupid to realise how hard it was. Along the way I met publishers and professors who tried to discourage me, and I was too naive to understand the discouragement. Nine months later I can say it was a great decision. Most of the content that needs to go in the book is written. I am a much better writer than I was, and I have a process that I built out of my own experience rather than borrowing from an expert.
The second way gives you speed too. For research I have gone through more material this year than in my life before it, and I have learned to parse it faster and understand it better.
But there comes an inevitable point when you hit the wall. You hit a problem and you don’t even have the language to define it. You don’t know how to solve it and you don’t know where to look. That is the trade-off. I was stuck on one such problem for a month, until yesterday, when I randomly came across an article that taught me what I needed. At some point, you do indeed need the theory, and it may not come the easiest way.
I want to call it luck. The article would have meant nothing to me in June, when I had nothing to apply it to. It only helped because I had already reached the place where it could. I wouldn’t call the stuck month a failure of diving first. It is what made the rescue possible.