You're Already Doing It Wrong

I recently bought my first lawnmower.

Exciting - I know. But I've been a city dweller my entire adult life, and now with our recent move I have a lawn for the first time. The first couple of cuts I dove right in - mowing was a preferred chore as a kid, so I had reps - but standing out in my own yard I had the realization that I was largely making it up as I went along.

The lawn got mowed, sure, but it took way longer than it should have. I didn't know the correct height to set the mower for my grass. Turning felt awkward. I occasionally felt like I was harming the lawn by cutting too short, or being an oaf with the route I was taking. The lines weren't even, and the investment of a nice new mower didn't make any of those shortcomings go away.

This is an incredibly rote tale - boring, even. But that's part of the point, because so often in my life (and I'd hazard yours too) we accept our level of competency with things on this everyday plane and simply count on iteration to slowly improve us over days, weeks, years, a lifetime.

We don't look at things like this as a skill that can be improved like any other, so we never set out to improve it as one - to our own detriment.

And when I say "skill" here, I'm really not talking about the cool, big skills like a mastering a pure jump shot or playing the saxophone.

For those things, we understand they're skills, and that the paths to competency are varied but come down to largely the same thing: instruction plus practice plus feedback - from yourself, a teacher, or peers - all feeding back into better instruction and more effective practice.

Throw in a dash of natural aptitude, for better or worse, and you've got your skill level. Most importantly, though - if you're bad at the saxophone and want to get better, you realize you have to go outside yourself for more information, teaching, or feedback.

With the things I'm talking about, we never make that leap.

We let them stay little speed bumps in our everyday that we silently and passively allow to derail or frustrate us. We don't see them as skills at all; we accept our current ability level tacitly, without ever clocking that there's an ability level to begin with. Maybe that's because mowing the lawn isn't like nailing a dope sax solo - but we don't do ourselves any favors when we refuse to see both as things that can be improved.

Because that's what it is. Everything we do is a skill, and lots of those skills - inevitably - you're already doing wrong, because you've never looked at it as one.
This has real consequences. You spend minutes, hours, days - hell, years on some stuff, I'm sure - just trying to figure something out, without ever stopping to think: "Hey, maybe I should hold my approach up against the collective wisdom of everyone who's done it before me. Just watch one YouTube video, for goodness sake, instead of struggling and making it up."

That snap of introspection is what I'm advocating for, and it's so simple.

Is there a repeated task in your life where you've gotten mixed or sub-optimal results?

Here's how to get better at it fast: notice it's happening, then spend five minutes - any time at all, really - learning how it actually works. And the more you do this, the easier it gets. Noticing is a muscle. Work it on the small stuff and you start catching the bigger stuff too.

So this is what I've been trying to do myself lately.

Improving my knife skills in the kitchen, which I'd left untouched in the ten years since I learned the correct way to dice an onion. Whether I was using the right stuff in the right order for a simple skincare routine (I wasn't). The keyboard shortcuts hiding in apps I've used for years. The correct products for cleaning up after our puppy, not just whatever's under the sink. Basically anything involving repairing my bike.

My urge to dive headfirst into a task and figure it out as I go is strong. But a little research applied to these tasks - the ones I'd gotten so-so results at before "trying shit" - has proved to be magic.

None of this sounds revolutionary. But we're busy, and that helps add weight to the assumption that the fastest and best way through these repeated tasks is to just do them.

And that reflex is exactly what I'm arguing against.

Learning to recognize that something you're doing is a skill that could be improved with a little thought is a skill in itself. And it's harder than it sounds, because we live in a kind of half daze around these things. They sit in the middle of our checklists and morning routines, clouded by our focus on the next task or the simple fact that we've done them the same way for years.

The next time something's taking too long, or the results keep coming out mixed, or you catch yourself slamming your head against a wall you've been slamming it against for years - stop. Spend the five minutes. Someone's already figured this out.

I went back out last weekend with the deck set a notch higher, mowing in straight passes instead of whatever I'd been doing before. Took half the time. The lines came out even. It's a good-looking lawn now - which, it turns out, is a thing you can just learn how to do.