“One of the greatest sources of despair is the belief that things should have been easier than they have turned out to be. We give up not simply because events are difficult, but because we hadn’t expected them to be so. The capacity to remain confident is, to a significant extent, a matter of internalizing a correct narrative about what difficulties it is normal to encounter.”
– The School of Life, Confidence – The Battle Against Timidity
“There wasn’t any particular player I modeled my game after. I tried to learn from everyone and create my own style. I studied past players. Truth be told I never had a favorite player. It’s just not my nature to go around idolizing people. I just go try to learn.”
In February 2013, I decided to begin working with a personal trainer.
From 2007 up until this time, I had been steading improving and expanding my training regimen having completed my first marathon and my fourth triathlon. I made this decision to push myself to the next level of fitness, and I needed formal guidance to get there.
Over the next three years, I learned an incredible amount about strength training and was able to significantly improve my overall condition through consistent and dedicated effort. In early 2016, I was awarded “Most Improved.”
Then, in early 2017, I learned that my trainer was relocating. Coincidentally, it was around this time where the purpose of our working relationship was beginning to lose its meaning. After all, we had gone through similar routines for an extended timeframe, and I didn’t require any further instruction or guidance in its current form. I was also operating within a fairly consistent routine.
Fortunately, via this foundation, I was able to maintain, and even expand upon, our original routine and continue to do so today.
While I set out to take my fitness to “the next level,” I never really defined what “the next level” really looked like. I just knew instinctively that I was operating well beneath my potential.
I am thankful to have had the financial means and opportunity to work with an experienced athlete for so long, and while his expertise contributed a great deal to my success, I discovered that the sheer habit of meeting with him represented half the effort.
Ironically, when coming up with the idea for this post, I came across an article by Marcia Reynolds entitled “Stop Making New Goals, Create Habits Instead.”
When I stop to consider this experience, and aspects of the book “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective” by Kenneth Stanley, I’ve learned you don’t need a specific “objective” to get started, but you do need to plan and repeat small shifts in behavior to experience positive, and lasting change, regardless of what the “change” entails.
I woke up the other morning realizing that I have had a fairly consistent dream over the past several years. While i can’t completely understand the associated timing, I am starting to understand the meaning of the dream.
First, let me share some brief background.
With very few exceptions, I have always considered myself to be a good student. I love to learn and school has always been a place of pure enjoyment for me.
Ironically enough, I was never interested in my English classes. I completed my assignments, read the books and participated in class, but frankly I was never enthusiastic about being there.
Not surprisingly, my dream involves my time spent in this class – or, more accurately, my time not spent in this class. For some reason or another, I either chose not to attend class or I simply decided that the assignments could be left until the end of the semester.
As the dream progresses, the semester eventually comes to a close, and you can imagine my emotional state as I quickly realize that I haven’t done anything and I am left wondering how I am ultimately going to succeed in a class in which I really haven’t participated. The realization of potential failure turns the “dream” into a nightmare.
Fortunately, the dream always seems to end with me successfully completing the class although it also omits the details regarding how.
As with anything in life, this dream is subject to interpretation. My interpretation of this dream is that I may be associating success with the existence of a plan. This dream seems to tell me that I can still be successful without one.
Right now, I really have no other choice but to believe.
The following is a press release that was recently sent to my personal and professional network. It calls attention to the launch of my personal branding web site as well as a new business venture focusing on information / graphic design. I’m including this information here as the majority of future posts will center around these two creative endeavors.
The first is the formation of my personal “brand” via the web site www.adriandaniels.com. This is a project that I have been thinking about for nearly a decade and it was only after much thought that I decided to finally push forward with its release.
While www.adriandaniels.com is my primary site, it’s ultimately intended to serve as a jump point for three other portals:
Incubator: (This site!) A non-fiction / experiential blog that is primarily focused on the generation of new ideas. Incubator incorporates personal and professional experiences and transforms them into formal essays and narratives.
Microcosms: A blog that allows for unrestricted exploration of new concepts in a “fictional” setting.
Pixeldust: A visual portal that shows how my art, design and photography portfolios have evolved over the past six years – and how they will continue to evolve and ultimately improve.
As these sites ultimately encapsulate my creative strengths, this web portfolio is something I collectively call a “Supercharged Creative Exploration”.
The second development that I am very excited about is the launch of a new information (graphic) design firm called Big Generator (www.biggenerator.com). For those of you who have seen examples of my work, you already have an understanding of what information design is all about – visuals that make complex information easier to understand and to use.
I made the decision to launch this part-time endeavor after considerable reflection into my strengths, interests, and values and combined this reflection with more than a decade of experience in graphic design and related disciplines (e.g. computer graphics, illustration, industrial design).
Ultimately, I am interested in doing what I can for my clients whether that need is strict “information design” or is classified under a general “graphic design” classification. In essence, I want to provide quality and effective visual solutions for my clients that simplify understanding and enhance and strengthen the customer experience.
I thought of a few other things with respect to 2010 goals …
Japan – One of my travel goals this year is to visit Japan, more specifically Kyoto and/or Tokyo. Although with the prevalence of shinkensen (bullet trains), I’ll probably visit both! Japan is somewhere I have always found intriguing and strangely enough, one place that I feel some remote “connection” to. While my initial interest in Japan was centered around their advanced railway system, the first chapter in the book I am reading now – “Japan Rising” – seemed to suggest an almost surreal tie to my own personality – a blend of opaqeness, paradoxes, power and purpose. While I have much more to read, I may explore this connection in more depth in a future post.
Since travel to Japan will likely happen in the summer, my primary goal now is to start learning the written and oral Japanese language. Today, I purchased Rosetta Stone’s Japanese Level 1 as it is highly rated and thus a good starting point. I started working on it this evening and am very impressed with the simplicity of the interface and overall design. After only fifteen minutes in using the software, I am actually able to comprehend simple sentences! Future posts will be designed to reinforce what I have learned on my own or through the course.
To provide some foundational context, I learned there are four “writing systems”: Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana and Romaji. Here is a brief description of each writing system from Rosetta Stone:
Kanji (漢字) is used for nouns, parts of adjectives and verbs, and Japanese names. Hiragana (ひらがな) is used for words that don’t use kanji, in certain word endings, and in place of kanji characters that are difficult to read. Katakana (カタカナ) is used for foreign words, countries, names, and technical words. Romaji, which uses the Roman script, is often used for acronyms, company names, foreign words, or as a transliteration of Japanese characters. Romaji allows learners of Japanese to read Japanese without learning the characters.
Since I am interested in learning the kanji writing system, I will primarily use Rosetta Stone with this method, but will switch to romaji if I can’t grasp what is being said – i.e. for me, it’s sometimes easier to read what is being said vs. a sole reliance upon the audio.
I also configured my Macintosh to switch between U.S. and hiragana (I don’t know exactly why kanji is not listed) through the System Preferences > Language and Text option. Once configured, you’ll see the relevant language icon located at the top right-hand corner of your screen – as shown here:
When I switch to the hiragana input type, I can start typing in that character set using the set of Japanese typefaces that are installed within Mac OS X. For example, these are the vowels a, e, i o and u: あえいおう. I think it will be good experience to learn how to enter these characters as well as to physically write the kanji / hiragana symbols by hand.
Edward Tufte – In my earlier post, I mentioned that I was going to focus more of my attention in the information design realm. Edward Tufte is considered a pioneer and leader in this space, and thus I recently acquired two of his books – Beautiful Evidence and Envisioning Information. While I have considerably improved upon my graphic and information design skills over the past decade, I think it’s appropriate to take my development to the next level through books such as this. I’ve updated my current reading list to include these new additions.
AdrianDaniels.com – With hosting plan finalized, I spent the past week refining the design and ended up taking a completely different approach to the design overall. I recently posted a placeholder page which represents the overall “look” of the site – the lettering shown is “Adrian” in katakana lettering. If you are interested, you can visit the web site where I was able to obtain this translation. While the design is nearly complete, I still have a fair amount of work to do in terms of the Flash conversion, thus I’ve set a deadline of February 1 to release the final version.
Incubator – You may have noticed that I’ve changed the title of this blog from “Big Generator” to “Incubator”. This is actually part of a larger strategy which will be discussed in the upcoming weeks. In any event, you can now visit this blog via the new URL which is http://incubator.adriandaniels.com. You can also visit my other site via http://microcosms.adriandaniels.com. If you have a WordPress blog and are interested in taking advantage of this subdomain mapping, visit this link for details.
Ten years ago (yes, I think all the time), I wrote the following article about two concepts that I labeled “true” and “false” advancement (learning) experience:
True advancement experience (TAE) is experience that is pro-active and “real”. Information is obtained on the way to a clear goal. The more information and experience that is turned up along the way strengthens the overall advancement experience. A goal must exist in order for true advancement to occur.
False advancement experience (FAE) is experience that is wasteful and potentially meaningless. FAE occurs when there is no key goal in place. Information that enters the system becomes quickly assimilated, but due to the increased flow, the retrieval and retention rate is decreases dramatically. Information overload will always occur in this type of learning environment. An example of a FAE is spending an increased amount of time configuring a windowing system when the command-line interface is already sufficient. Experience gained from system-specific configuration is mostly FAE since most of the time spent is due to lack of planning and documentation more than anything else.
Knowing the differences between TAE and FAE is very important to overall advancement. Time is always a commodity; therefore it must be used wisely. Know exactly what you are attempting to learn and what you need to accomplish, and your advancement and success rate will increase.
Ten years later, has my perspective changed about TAE and FAE? Yes and no. Let me explain.
Let’s say that you are interested in computer graphics, and you have an interest in animation. One potential starting point is to acquire a 3D animation program and start learning the basics. After installing and launching the application, you are overwhelmed with the number of features. This is where things become interesting.
If you start investigating other aspects of the program that have nothing (or little) to do with animation, you could label this “false” advancement experience since what you are learning is not essential to your end goal. In contrast, if you stay true to your goal of becoming an animator (or at least learning how) and just focus on aspects of the program that involve “animation”, you will gain the experience that you were originally interested in and thus have gained “true” advancement experience.
One possibility of course is that you could choose to learn about other aspects of the program first and then eventually get back to the core “animation” functionality. In this way, you are just taking a slight “detour” from your destination to gain broader context. Is this really “false” advancement experience?
Another possibility is that you choose the second path – i.e. “true” advancement experience – and find out that you have to learn other aspects of the program to be able to start animating. More specifically, you may need to learn how to create a 3D model that you can eventually animate! Is this really “true” advancement experience?
As you can see here, labeling one’s learning (or advancement) experience as “true” or “false is perhaps too restrictive.
Given my pursuits of numerous goals, I think learning effectively comes down to awareness (“what do I want to learn?”) and focus (“how do I want to learn the material?”).
For example, in order to gain the most from your learning experience, you need to know what you want to accomplish. The answer could very well be “I don’t know”. This is a perfectly acceptable answer as it provides you with a lot of freedom to explore different areas. In contrast, if you know that you want to be an animator (using the example above), this at least gives you a “learning beacon” towards which you can navigate.
Once you have awareness, you now need to focus. Assuming you know you want to learn animation, you can still explore other areas of the software application without feeling that you are veering off-course. The trick here is that the degree of your focus will determine how much time and effort you spend in a different area, and whether you ultimately return to your original “path”.
For example, let’s say that you need a 3D model to animate. Instead of taking a separate path to learn how to model, you could instead focus your efforts on using an existing 3D model. This would save you time and get you back on track. But here again, there is some risk in being “too” focused on your end goal. At some point you will eventually need to learn how to model new objects to further broaden your experience. Should you do that now or later?
At this point, you can start to understand some of the challenges I’ve personally faced in learning new things. My personality is one that loves to learn and build connections between unrelated topics. Because I understand the benefits, I allow myself considerable freedom to explore new areas and concepts to formulate new ones. However, as I learn new material, I take time to continuously refine where I am going (i.e. “awareness”).
In summary, when taking on a new challenge, take the time to gain awareness of what you want to learn and try to map out a strategy on how to accomplish your goal. Once you get into the learning process, you will find new “pathways” that you need to consider taking. Don’t be afraid to take these paths but keep your destination in mind, and don’t be afraid to change the destination.