Personal Development

Questions and model answers

1. Is there anything you're teaching yourself outside of school or work at the moment?

   Cooking, though I'd hesitate to call it teaching myself — I mostly follow recipes and hope. There's no course and no plan, just a lot of medium-quality dinners. What changed recently is that I started cooking the same four dishes repeatedly instead of a new thing every week. That sounds boring but it's the first time I've actually improved. The fourth attempt at a dish is where you notice the pan was too hot the first three times. Before that I was collecting recipes rather than learning to cook, which felt productive and wasn't. Nobody eats a recipe. I'd say I'm now competent at exactly four meals, which is a smaller claim than I'd have made a year ago and considerably more true.

2. When you want to get better at something, do you prefer a structured course or figuring it out yourself?

   A course, but only after I've flailed around on my own for a bit first. If I go straight into a structured course I don't know what any of it is for — the instructor answers questions I haven't asked yet, and none of it sticks. I sat through an entire photography course once and remember none of it. Whereas if I've spent two weeks doing it badly, I arrive with actual problems, and then the course is worth its price. It's an inefficient order, I'll admit. You waste time discovering things somebody could have told you in five minutes. But the five minutes only works if you already know why you're listening, and you don't know that until you've been properly stuck.

3. Tell me about a skill you picked up that turned out to be more useful than you expected.

   Touch typing, of all things. I learned it at sixteen because a friend bet me I couldn't, and it seemed like a party trick at the time. I practised on a website with falling letters, like a game. What I didn't anticipate was how much it changes writing itself. When you're not looking at the keyboard, the gap between having a thought and it being on the screen basically closes, and you stop losing sentences while hunting for the comma. I write differently now — messier first drafts, more of them. Nobody sells touch typing as a thinking skill, which is probably why so few people bother. It took about three weeks and it's saved me more time than anything else I've deliberately learned.

4. Do you think self-improvement has become too much of an obligation?

   For some people, yes, and I think the tell is how it's talked about. Improving at something you chose is fine — that's just interest with a bit of structure. What's different now is the assumption that spare time should produce something, so reading becomes a count of books and a walk becomes steps. Everything gets a number. My worry isn't that people are learning too much, it's that rest has started to feel like a failure to optimize. I know people who feel guilty watching television, which is a strange thing to feel guilty about. So I'd say the activity isn't the problem — the obligation attached to it is. Those get confused constantly, usually by people selling something.

The Korean translation, the expression breakdowns, the reusable frames and the common-mistake notes for these four questions are in the book. The recording and this transcript are free, here and on YouTube.