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silveradept[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]
I was thinking again, which is always dangerous, but I was perusing other people's December lists to see if there were any good questions that I could pluck for myself to fill space with and I saw someone asking about cooking and relating to cooking. For me, I tend to summarize my skills as "put a recipe in front of me and I can produce something that resembles what the recipe wants to produce" (even if I might have an anxiety about whether it's going to turn out well, especially if this is the first time I've gone through the recipe process). I'm not particularly skilled at kitchen improvisation, or that remarkable skill of being able to look at a basket of ingredients and say, "that looks like [protein] in the style of [cuisine], guest-starring [greens! vegetables! sauces!], and it'll take us about an hour to make completely." Maybe with more recipe experience, I'll be able to do that better, but for now, I don't know that I could do it into something that will be delicious.
There's a slightly bigger question hiding behind the one about cooking, for me, because of the way that I would phrase the answer to the question. I'd say "I can follow a recipe, but I'm not particularly good at cooking," because the act of improvisation and creation has become cooking, while following a recipe is not being creative, it's following directions. It's the equivalent of saying "Well, I can trace a drawing pretty well, but I'm not any good at art" or "I can create fanfic, but I'm not any good at writing." Because there's become an assumption, sometimes an insistence, that the ability to create ex nihilo, "totally original", is the thing that actually counts as a creative endeavor. So the question that I should probably be required to answer is:
It's a mean double bind to believe in a fixed mindset, or to go through your early life being praised for talent or other things that are innate virtues, rather than the effort that is being put into something, or even the improvement in something that ultimately fails, but fails at a further step or in a different way that suggests a different skill might need to be practiced or improved to bring a project to fruition. In the fixed mindset, the things you are good at are often the things that happen with less effort, because the are more compatible with you and the environment you were raised in. Being a "gifted" child means that doing well in school is pretty well expected, but because it's expected, to make it something praiseworthy requires extraordinary achievements and results. And, as many kids who were "smart" or "gifted" find out sooner or later, at some point you hit the wall, or the ceiling, or the point where things stop being low-effort and high-success or high-reward. Reaching the limit of your talents or finding a discipline in which you don't have any talent or inclination can be devastating, because the fixed mindset insists that if it didn't come easy, it's not coming at all, and more often than not, those gifted kids who were used to being thought of positively start getting a more negative outlook from the people they've come to value. Why is this so hard when everything before this came so easily? Why isn't anyone stopping the people who are using this as ammunition for teasing or bullying or making fun of someone for not being as right as they have been before? Why are the people who thought of me as bright and promising now shaking their heads and wondering where everything went wrong? Or, as the case sometimes is, why the fuck is adulting so goddamn hard?
When someone reaches a limit, and stepping beyond that limit and trying to do things results in negative consequences, someone learns pretty quickly not to step past the limits. New things become suspicious, because there's the experience of "well, if I don't do this right the first time, someone's going to make fun of me" and "if I don't do this right the first time, it's just not going to happen." Even when you're a full-grown-up and the only person that's seeing whether or not this succeeds is you.
Yet another reason to think my first manager at work was a terrible manager - because of the way she treated me, I felt entirely terrified of doing anything other than something that was easily justifiable as a traditional librarian thing, because when I had been doing things that stretched my mind and my creativity and were letting me use skills I had learned and wanted to practice, they were used against me as wasting time or not doing my job or otherwise as reasons to say punishing me to the point where if I sneezed wrong, I could be fired, was entirely justified. So I retreated, and every manager after that one has basically had to pass secret competence-of-manager tests to see whether they get the full experience of my expertise and knowledge or not.
It still makes me question whether I'm good at this librarian thing or not. Even for how long I've been doing it. And it poisoned (and continues to poison) my relationships with several people at that location, because it became clear that there were other staff who were talking about things I was or wasn't doing to the manager, who would then spring them upon me as problems that needed immediate fixing without bothering to check for context, to ask what was going on, or even to stop at an intermediary step of "I recognize this thing is interesting to you, but I really want you to focus on doing [Z], okay?"
The other side of the fixed mindset is that things you're talented at aren't things you're good at if there's someone better than you at it. Or several someones. Because your talent only goes so far, and there are always going to be people who are better than you are, through greater talent or (more likely) through having done a lot of work and put in a lot of effort to achieve their successes. Frustratingly, that second option usually isn't the default when we talk about successful people! We'll talk about talent and smarts and fixed aspects of them, but unless we're going for something like inspiration porn (or worse, cripspiration or marginalized-person-makes-good-on-one-in-a-billion-chance porn), it's almost never mentioned the amount of effort that goes into that success. Because, for reasons that I suspect serve capitalism and the delusion of the meritocracy, we want our role models to make difficult, effortful things look effortless, as a byproduct of their unique fixed abilities, rather than seeing them as someone who got there by working a lot harder, or as someone who had advantages available to them that most other people do not have and will never have, rather than by being a lot smarter. Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, even if all the skills I have at being a librarian are things that can be taught and worked on.
But I am good at being a librarian, even if the truth is that I'm usually working from a a mental script when I do the magic. When I follow a cooking recipe, what I create usually tastes like what the recipe intended. (Presentation? Maybe not. Taste? Oh yeah.) So I'm pretty good at cooking. Given an instruction set and the tools and scripts to do it with, I've successfully installed custom operating systems on phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops alike. Someone else contributed the expertise of the scripts that needed to be run, and the understanding of how the phone is set up so those scripts will succeed, so I'm not good at developing those scripts, but I am pretty good at finding and running them. And troubleshooting when things go sideways, because the error messages make sense and give enough detail for me to find where someone else has had the same problem and to see what the solution is. Which sometimes means finding and stripping some wire to cause a short to force a tablet into debug mode so that a script can install the custom operating system on it after having messed up one of the recipe steps earlier. And other times means going to the Wayback machine to collect the archive of a website that went offline some several years ago, unpack the archive, navigate the site, find the appropriate files to have along for the ride, and then transform an original model Chromebook into a fully functioning Linux laptop, which involved hardware hacking to find and turn on the developer switch, and then to remove a case so as to apply the electrical tape that had been covering the developer switch to a specific chip on the board so that a security check could be bypassed and the firmware of the Chromebook overwritten with a compatible BIOS, onto which Linux could be loaded, thus turning a device that had long since stopped receiving updates into one that can run appropriate updating scripts for itself to stay safe, secure, and become a relevant Internet device once more. (And, because I have experience running Linux machines, I can then set myself up with a user account on that device, separate from the user account of whose Chromebook it actually is, and give myself the power to make sure that the update scripts can be run from my account, since I'm more likely to be using it than them.) None of the steps in this process were things I had to discover myself. All I had to do was follow directions. But "following directions" often has an underlying assumption that you understand the directions well enough to follow them correctly.
Also, as an aside, those lists of directions that say to read the directions before starting, and then as the last direction say "Now that you've read the directions, only do directions 1, 24, 25, and 76, and don't let on to your classmates that you're doing it right" can go die in a fire, because they "trick" someone by waiting until the end to reveal that they meant a literal interpretation of "read the directions" and the associated implication that no actions should be taken until all the directions had been read, rather than the common usage of "read the directions," where the implications is to read the direction for the step in question and then perform it. Maybe I'm bitter about being caught by such things, or maybe because my brain recognizes immediately that if they really wanted people to read all the directions before performing any of them, they could damn well be clear about it. (But then people wouldn't be tricked by the language ambiguity! Which is really about the only thing such a "test" like that is good for - as a prelude to a robust discussion about how language is often ambiguous and ambiguity in instruction should be reduced as much as is possible, even if the resulting prose looks weird to the eye of the beholder. Also, all directions should be checked to make sure they don't sound ambiguous if read aloud, and checked for effectiveness by someone who hasn't heard them before to make sure that the directions given result in the steps being taken in the right order, as there are so many times where the warning about how someone can do a thing wrong comes after the direction where they can do it wrong! For things or processes where stuff can be borked or bricked permanently if something happens that puts a person off-script, the directions need to be super clear.
I wouldn't say I'm good with tools, but the three light fixtures I've replaced in the house since I bought it suggest otherwise. Along with the demolition of the basement closet and the bar in the garage. And the dartboard case that's still screwed into the concrete wall. And the reinforced clothes hanging bars in all of the closets. And the toilet downstairs that I've replaced once and removed and reseated once, while also successfully changing out the floor seal from use-once wax to a reusable and much less messy rubber. And diagnosing and fixing the leak that was in the toilet tank from the rusted-out screws. And replacning the filler valve that had broken right around the same time. And the repainted bathrooms (once each) and the media room accent wall, which are a direct result of having painted houses for two summers and learned skills in exterior painting that are transferable to interior painting. Plus getting wood blocks that were the remainders from the closet demolition off of the electrical cable that had been run through them, which took a good bit of hand sawing out the appropriate notches without actually sawing into the electric cables. And did I mention the part where I successfully built circuits with wire, a push button switch, a resistor, and a power source that all fit in half of a shampoo bottle? (Admittedly, I needed to go back and get the resistor after I let the magic smoke out of the first one, and had I listened to the person at the Radio Shack, I would have gotten them the first time, but hey, I only burnt one or two of them out before recognizing what I needed. Or consulting the electrical engineer in the family. Probably both.)
I know I'm not good at the instrument I play, at least in the sense of "could walk into the Major Metropolitan Symphony's try-outs and land myself a spot," but I've never wanted to do that as a career, so I didn't put in the effort and practice to achieve that level of skill. Instead, I had a really good time in the collegiate marching band, and I'm able to keep playing in a community group that makes good music and doesn't require me to have ridiculous range (most of the time), so I'm good enough in that regard to keep playing, and that's really all I ever wanted in the first place, was to keep playing interesting music for people. Different goals, different game. A hobby, rather than a side hustle. And what is music but a set of directions to follow, accompanied by someone who is trying to help interpret those directions so that we all play it the same way? And the different between a casual musician like myself and a professional musician who makes the really good stuff is often a matter of degrees and subtleties and learned experience with themselves, with the instruments, with the balance and harmony and knowing stuff that absolutely can be taught but is profoundly magical when experienced. (Even if, and sometimes especially if, you know all that stuff yourself.)
So, if there were something I was going to say that I am good at, the most honest answer I have is "I'm good at following directions." Which is also probably the most misleading answer that I can give to that question, too, because without the context above, that answer doesn't sound like it would amount to anything at all. Although I think it might make some of the scientists and engineers laugh, because they probably understand that in so many things in life, and especially in an information profession like mine, you charge someone one dollar for the chalk mark, and nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine dollars for knowing where to put it and how hard to hit the thing once you've drawn the mark.
I was thinking again, which is always dangerous, but I was perusing other people's December lists to see if there were any good questions that I could pluck for myself to fill space with and I saw someone asking about cooking and relating to cooking. For me, I tend to summarize my skills as "put a recipe in front of me and I can produce something that resembles what the recipe wants to produce" (even if I might have an anxiety about whether it's going to turn out well, especially if this is the first time I've gone through the recipe process). I'm not particularly skilled at kitchen improvisation, or that remarkable skill of being able to look at a basket of ingredients and say, "that looks like [protein] in the style of [cuisine], guest-starring [greens! vegetables! sauces!], and it'll take us about an hour to make completely." Maybe with more recipe experience, I'll be able to do that better, but for now, I don't know that I could do it into something that will be delicious.
There's a slightly bigger question hiding behind the one about cooking, for me, because of the way that I would phrase the answer to the question. I'd say "I can follow a recipe, but I'm not particularly good at cooking," because the act of improvisation and creation has become cooking, while following a recipe is not being creative, it's following directions. It's the equivalent of saying "Well, I can trace a drawing pretty well, but I'm not any good at art" or "I can create fanfic, but I'm not any good at writing." Because there's become an assumption, sometimes an insistence, that the ability to create ex nihilo, "totally original", is the thing that actually counts as a creative endeavor. So the question that I should probably be required to answer is:
What are you good at?And I will probably say "not much, you?" because of the assumption that creating from whole cloth, without guide, without recipe, without tracing, (possibly without references, but really, that's stretching it a bit past too far) is the sign that someone is good at something, is truly creative, and that anything else is not as valid, because it's copying or derivative or imitation or just following directions.
It's a mean double bind to believe in a fixed mindset, or to go through your early life being praised for talent or other things that are innate virtues, rather than the effort that is being put into something, or even the improvement in something that ultimately fails, but fails at a further step or in a different way that suggests a different skill might need to be practiced or improved to bring a project to fruition. In the fixed mindset, the things you are good at are often the things that happen with less effort, because the are more compatible with you and the environment you were raised in. Being a "gifted" child means that doing well in school is pretty well expected, but because it's expected, to make it something praiseworthy requires extraordinary achievements and results. And, as many kids who were "smart" or "gifted" find out sooner or later, at some point you hit the wall, or the ceiling, or the point where things stop being low-effort and high-success or high-reward. Reaching the limit of your talents or finding a discipline in which you don't have any talent or inclination can be devastating, because the fixed mindset insists that if it didn't come easy, it's not coming at all, and more often than not, those gifted kids who were used to being thought of positively start getting a more negative outlook from the people they've come to value. Why is this so hard when everything before this came so easily? Why isn't anyone stopping the people who are using this as ammunition for teasing or bullying or making fun of someone for not being as right as they have been before? Why are the people who thought of me as bright and promising now shaking their heads and wondering where everything went wrong? Or, as the case sometimes is, why the fuck is adulting so goddamn hard?
When someone reaches a limit, and stepping beyond that limit and trying to do things results in negative consequences, someone learns pretty quickly not to step past the limits. New things become suspicious, because there's the experience of "well, if I don't do this right the first time, someone's going to make fun of me" and "if I don't do this right the first time, it's just not going to happen." Even when you're a full-grown-up and the only person that's seeing whether or not this succeeds is you.
Yet another reason to think my first manager at work was a terrible manager - because of the way she treated me, I felt entirely terrified of doing anything other than something that was easily justifiable as a traditional librarian thing, because when I had been doing things that stretched my mind and my creativity and were letting me use skills I had learned and wanted to practice, they were used against me as wasting time or not doing my job or otherwise as reasons to say punishing me to the point where if I sneezed wrong, I could be fired, was entirely justified. So I retreated, and every manager after that one has basically had to pass secret competence-of-manager tests to see whether they get the full experience of my expertise and knowledge or not.
It still makes me question whether I'm good at this librarian thing or not. Even for how long I've been doing it. And it poisoned (and continues to poison) my relationships with several people at that location, because it became clear that there were other staff who were talking about things I was or wasn't doing to the manager, who would then spring them upon me as problems that needed immediate fixing without bothering to check for context, to ask what was going on, or even to stop at an intermediary step of "I recognize this thing is interesting to you, but I really want you to focus on doing [Z], okay?"
The other side of the fixed mindset is that things you're talented at aren't things you're good at if there's someone better than you at it. Or several someones. Because your talent only goes so far, and there are always going to be people who are better than you are, through greater talent or (more likely) through having done a lot of work and put in a lot of effort to achieve their successes. Frustratingly, that second option usually isn't the default when we talk about successful people! We'll talk about talent and smarts and fixed aspects of them, but unless we're going for something like inspiration porn (or worse, cripspiration or marginalized-person-makes-good-on-one-in-a-billion-chance porn), it's almost never mentioned the amount of effort that goes into that success. Because, for reasons that I suspect serve capitalism and the delusion of the meritocracy, we want our role models to make difficult, effortful things look effortless, as a byproduct of their unique fixed abilities, rather than seeing them as someone who got there by working a lot harder, or as someone who had advantages available to them that most other people do not have and will never have, rather than by being a lot smarter. Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, even if all the skills I have at being a librarian are things that can be taught and worked on.
But I am good at being a librarian, even if the truth is that I'm usually working from a a mental script when I do the magic. When I follow a cooking recipe, what I create usually tastes like what the recipe intended. (Presentation? Maybe not. Taste? Oh yeah.) So I'm pretty good at cooking. Given an instruction set and the tools and scripts to do it with, I've successfully installed custom operating systems on phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops alike. Someone else contributed the expertise of the scripts that needed to be run, and the understanding of how the phone is set up so those scripts will succeed, so I'm not good at developing those scripts, but I am pretty good at finding and running them. And troubleshooting when things go sideways, because the error messages make sense and give enough detail for me to find where someone else has had the same problem and to see what the solution is. Which sometimes means finding and stripping some wire to cause a short to force a tablet into debug mode so that a script can install the custom operating system on it after having messed up one of the recipe steps earlier. And other times means going to the Wayback machine to collect the archive of a website that went offline some several years ago, unpack the archive, navigate the site, find the appropriate files to have along for the ride, and then transform an original model Chromebook into a fully functioning Linux laptop, which involved hardware hacking to find and turn on the developer switch, and then to remove a case so as to apply the electrical tape that had been covering the developer switch to a specific chip on the board so that a security check could be bypassed and the firmware of the Chromebook overwritten with a compatible BIOS, onto which Linux could be loaded, thus turning a device that had long since stopped receiving updates into one that can run appropriate updating scripts for itself to stay safe, secure, and become a relevant Internet device once more. (And, because I have experience running Linux machines, I can then set myself up with a user account on that device, separate from the user account of whose Chromebook it actually is, and give myself the power to make sure that the update scripts can be run from my account, since I'm more likely to be using it than them.) None of the steps in this process were things I had to discover myself. All I had to do was follow directions. But "following directions" often has an underlying assumption that you understand the directions well enough to follow them correctly.
Also, as an aside, those lists of directions that say to read the directions before starting, and then as the last direction say "Now that you've read the directions, only do directions 1, 24, 25, and 76, and don't let on to your classmates that you're doing it right" can go die in a fire, because they "trick" someone by waiting until the end to reveal that they meant a literal interpretation of "read the directions" and the associated implication that no actions should be taken until all the directions had been read, rather than the common usage of "read the directions," where the implications is to read the direction for the step in question and then perform it. Maybe I'm bitter about being caught by such things, or maybe because my brain recognizes immediately that if they really wanted people to read all the directions before performing any of them, they could damn well be clear about it. (But then people wouldn't be tricked by the language ambiguity! Which is really about the only thing such a "test" like that is good for - as a prelude to a robust discussion about how language is often ambiguous and ambiguity in instruction should be reduced as much as is possible, even if the resulting prose looks weird to the eye of the beholder. Also, all directions should be checked to make sure they don't sound ambiguous if read aloud, and checked for effectiveness by someone who hasn't heard them before to make sure that the directions given result in the steps being taken in the right order, as there are so many times where the warning about how someone can do a thing wrong comes after the direction where they can do it wrong! For things or processes where stuff can be borked or bricked permanently if something happens that puts a person off-script, the directions need to be super clear.
I wouldn't say I'm good with tools, but the three light fixtures I've replaced in the house since I bought it suggest otherwise. Along with the demolition of the basement closet and the bar in the garage. And the dartboard case that's still screwed into the concrete wall. And the reinforced clothes hanging bars in all of the closets. And the toilet downstairs that I've replaced once and removed and reseated once, while also successfully changing out the floor seal from use-once wax to a reusable and much less messy rubber. And diagnosing and fixing the leak that was in the toilet tank from the rusted-out screws. And replacning the filler valve that had broken right around the same time. And the repainted bathrooms (once each) and the media room accent wall, which are a direct result of having painted houses for two summers and learned skills in exterior painting that are transferable to interior painting. Plus getting wood blocks that were the remainders from the closet demolition off of the electrical cable that had been run through them, which took a good bit of hand sawing out the appropriate notches without actually sawing into the electric cables. And did I mention the part where I successfully built circuits with wire, a push button switch, a resistor, and a power source that all fit in half of a shampoo bottle? (Admittedly, I needed to go back and get the resistor after I let the magic smoke out of the first one, and had I listened to the person at the Radio Shack, I would have gotten them the first time, but hey, I only burnt one or two of them out before recognizing what I needed. Or consulting the electrical engineer in the family. Probably both.)
I know I'm not good at the instrument I play, at least in the sense of "could walk into the Major Metropolitan Symphony's try-outs and land myself a spot," but I've never wanted to do that as a career, so I didn't put in the effort and practice to achieve that level of skill. Instead, I had a really good time in the collegiate marching band, and I'm able to keep playing in a community group that makes good music and doesn't require me to have ridiculous range (most of the time), so I'm good enough in that regard to keep playing, and that's really all I ever wanted in the first place, was to keep playing interesting music for people. Different goals, different game. A hobby, rather than a side hustle. And what is music but a set of directions to follow, accompanied by someone who is trying to help interpret those directions so that we all play it the same way? And the different between a casual musician like myself and a professional musician who makes the really good stuff is often a matter of degrees and subtleties and learned experience with themselves, with the instruments, with the balance and harmony and knowing stuff that absolutely can be taught but is profoundly magical when experienced. (Even if, and sometimes especially if, you know all that stuff yourself.)
So, if there were something I was going to say that I am good at, the most honest answer I have is "I'm good at following directions." Which is also probably the most misleading answer that I can give to that question, too, because without the context above, that answer doesn't sound like it would amount to anything at all. Although I think it might make some of the scientists and engineers laugh, because they probably understand that in so many things in life, and especially in an information profession like mine, you charge someone one dollar for the chalk mark, and nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine dollars for knowing where to put it and how hard to hit the thing once you've drawn the mark.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-01 07:24 am (UTC)And having "never good enough" instilled in you is shitty behavior from parents.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-01 08:21 am (UTC)Yep, it wasn't great parenting behavior. I think the idea was to repress arrogance (I'm afraid it didn't really, Pride is my big deadly, but it's the sneaky silent kind) and save me from being bullied plus my mom is incapable of paying a compliment without a "but..." attached to it, but really it just screwed me up in a different way.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-01 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-01 06:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-01 08:05 pm (UTC)