When you’re learning a new sport, art, or any activity, you basically suck at it. That’s what it means to be a beginner. But if you keep at it, you will learn to get better. It occurred to me recently, while I was sucking in a game of ultimate frisbee, that you are actually learning two things in parallel.
First, you are learning the needed skills: how to move, common tricks, techniques, etc…
But secondly, you are also learning to how to evaluate the execution of those skills.
This is all fine and good as you learn these two things in parallel. However, when you slack off for a long time, you lose your edge. I used to be quite a good ultimate player. As of last Saturday, I know that this is no longer the case. The problem is that while you have gotten rusty at the skill itself, you still fully remember how to evaluate. Thus, you can berate yourself for your poor execution.
And as you get older, you accumulate more activities that this can occur in. After all, you can’t be in top form in every activity all the time. Recently I’ve noticed it in myself for frisbee, mountain biking, calligraphy, and even coding.
The sad thing is that you’re probably doing pretty well–just not as well as when your evaluation criteria were being honed. Certainly better than a beginner. (and probably better than people who have been doing it a while.) That is, I actually was playing a pretty good frisbee game!
The trick of course, is to change your evaluation strategy: try to remember what it was like as a total beginner, be extra-cognizant of the things which you are doing right, and give yourself time to re-form the habits and muscle-memory that go into a skill. And if it’s something that you don’t need to be “the best at,” allow yourself simply enjoy the activity rather itself rather than always pushing for “better.”