001 - I Have Eight Spiders

When I graduated high school I felt that I had already missed the boat on numerous things I had always wanted to do. Things like learning a foreign language, a new instrument, or juggling. I had read somewhere that the human brain reaches a point where it stops growing, and thus your ability to learn complicated tasks with any meaningful proficiency disappears. Forever. This seemed backed up by what I perceived as a truism about mathematics; that all great magicians produce their best work before they turn 25. (Shout out to my sophomore year high school math teacher, who killed my love of math.)

I bring this all up because it was such an easy thing to fall into, this idea that your brain calcifies and you are stuck being what you are at 20 for the rest of your life. Now having lived almost twice that span I can assure you that such things are nonsense. And I have video games to thank for that.

When I was in my early twenties I lived with a bunch of flatmates, and many of them played video games. I had dabbled in Xbox and PC gaming in high school, but had not planned on continuing the hobby into my adult life. Consoles were expensive, and a recent brush with the absolute time-sink of World of Warcraft had me a bit gunshy of anything involving repeated activity and a screen. Enter Guitar Hero. Many nights after work I would come home to a living room full of exuberant drunk friends taking turns shredding away at rock and roll hits with an oversize controller shaped like a guitar. Guitar hero is a beat-matching game, similar to Dance Dance Revolution, where you press combinations of buttons to match a pattern being shown on screen. If you match correctly the song continues to play, the on-screen crowd cheers, and the beguiling illusion that you are making the music is conjured. I was hooked at once. It felt like anyone could be a rockstar, even me!

It all came to a crashing halt one evening when I had someone cute over. I fired up Guitar Hero and flawlessly shredded my way through “Sweet Child of Mine.” Instead of being impressed, my crush playfully said, “Imagine if you’d spent as many hours practicing the real guitar as you did playing that game.” A crushing disappointment to be sure, and yet, also a revelation of sorts. I’m sad to say I didn’t exactly get the broader point at that moment, choosing instead to take the advice literally. That night as I lay in bed, I estimated the total hours I had practiced Guitar Hero, roughly 150, and decided I would spend that much time learning to play guitar. The next day I made a little chart, bought a cheap guitar, and started practicing.

I finished my 150 hours in about two months and was surprised at how well I could play the guitar. Nothing special, but enough to entertain my friends and play simple comedy songs at local open mics. I had discovered the idea of grinding. Just like in a video game, where you can decide to apply a given amount of your time to “leveling up,” you can do it in real life. I have since applied this mentality to learning to juggle, performing close-up magic, and playing accordion, all with great success. But to date, my biggest achievement was finally learning a foreign language.

When I launched myself into the project of moving to Norway for a year to study wooden boat building, I also committed to learning the language. To that end I spent roughly 500 hours studying Norwegian prior to moving. I accomplished this via a variety of means including, books, films, television, internet courses, podcasts, and, yes, Duolingo. Although I must confess this last one had little utility beyond expanding my vocabulary with some truly bizarre sentences, “Jeg har atte edderkopper,” [I have eight spiders.] being a particular favorite of mine. (Perhaps that’s the genius of that method, I’ve never forgotten that sentence…)

I am not the best judge of how good my Norwegian is; but I have heard from enough people that it is workable, a rough-hewn hammer made from a stick and a rock with a hole in it. Will it pound nails? Probably, not always, and not with great accuracy, but it’s better than no hammer at all. I am probably being too hard on myself. Stone hammer or not, I was able to tell jokes in Norwegian that made people laugh. I ordered food in restaurants, negotiated the purchase of second hand goods, discussed philosophy with friends, and on one memorable occasion convinced the staff in a museum to let a friend and I go in without paying in order to see a taxidermy giraffe. At the age of 33 a decade and a half after giving up, I decided to learn a foreign language by investing increments of my time, with the same mentality as working at a video game.

I am a huge fan of the Dark Souls series of video games. This is because nearly everyone has the same experience the first time they play one.  They happily toodle along for a while, some longer than others, and eventually hit a wall. An area, enemy, or boss fight that just seems, well, impossible, unsurmountable. But the beauty of a video game is that you have unlimited tries, you can dust yourself off and run at the wall again, learning, incrementally, bit-by-bit, how to press forward. If you invest that time, the triumph is all the sweeter.

Comparing the grind of a video game to learning a new skill is by no means a novel realization, but I am sharing it with you because of the particular way it changed my own perception of what was possible for me. I had given up, because I thought that since I had passed some arbitrary point of no return where learning was now impossible. I have since learned that there are numerous such points, age 27, age 30, age 35, whatever, where you lose facility to learn new things well, or at least as well as you used to. I think that’s a bunch of bullshit. I think it just takes more practice, and maybe a bit more willpower as you get older.