Getting comfortable being bad at things
Every piece here is about the same feeling: being visibly new at something. Read the last one as a training plan.
- Being Bad
How fear of looking stupid held Kaminsky back from new things, and how learning Spanish in Mexico taught him to be bad at something in public.
- You Are NOT Dumb, You Just Lack the Prerequisites
Lelouch argues that struggling with hard subjects like math usually means missing prerequisites rather than ability, which he found after 150 days of rebuilding from the basics.
- Learned Blankness
How labeling a domain as one you "just don't understand," like mechanical things or math, makes people stop thinking before they've tried the obvious next question.
- Learn to love the Moat of Low Status
Hall argues that fear of looking bad while learning keeps people from richer lives, and that the only way across is to accept the embarrassment and do it anyway, as she did playing poker on television.
- Being Generally Capable
Slide-style notes making the case for becoming generally capable and comfortable with failure, before a stalled life forces you to rethink your model of the world.
Next path: The decision you keep putting off