If you have this
syndrome, the my brain doesn't actually have any damn idea how to
judge when I have accomplished something syndrome, here's what you
need to do.
You need to learn
something, anything, all the way through. Calmly and with attention
to the process. You can do this by yourself or you can do it with a
mentor or in a group or any damn way you want to. Just take the time
and trouble to master something. In the oodles and boodles of spare
time you have as a driven-always-trying-to-accomplish-something-but-never-quite-sure-if-you-are-actually-doing-it-because-it-never-seems-good-enough-type-person,
take up some irrelevant activity. Haul your butt down to a community
college and sign up for Glass-Blowing 101.
Figure that it
will take you forever to learn glass-blowing and you will have no tangible
results for your efforts for a good long time. This is important.
The no damn results thing. You are not learning how to achieve results
- you are learning what learning feels like. The internal sensations
that accompany going from absolute clueless incompetence to marvelous
awe and wonder that you were able to bring something into existence
that wasn't there before. This is why its important that you learn something
no one else but you gives a damn about. Yoga, meditation, the science
of growing chili peppers.
In your glass-blowing
or what-have-you travails you will learn that learning entails frustration.
And awkwardness. And getting your hands burned. And boredom. And sudden
leaps in ability. And endless patience. And wonderment. And instinct
born of experience. And appreciation. Experimentation. That people who
do things a certain way have a reason for them. Mistakes. Originality.
And oodles of other stuff. See the thing you have to learn about
learning in order to be adequate at it from your evolutionary brain's
point of view, is not what results from it, but what emotions accompany
it. What you are doing, extremely cleverly, is switching from the
need for an outside source of affirmation, which you will not believe
anyway because it's not coming from your dad, to an internal source
- that internal source being your familiarity with the inner sensations
that accompany mastering something. You are teaching your body to recognize
the feelings that go with an accomplishment.
This will pay off
for you huge-time in the rest of your life. You will transfer your glass-blowing
experiences to the rest of your life. You will start saying reflective
things like - 'when it comes to employees, I've decided it's a bit like
glass-blowing. You apply this heat and pressure that forms them
but it's very important to let them cool off or the new shape won't
take. You've got to back off and give people a chance to absorb what
you're throwing at them.' And similar philosophical stuff. This will
be so much fun! You will love being able to spout reflective philosophical
life-things and sound all wise. Plus, you will enjoy actually being
wise.
The other thing
you need to do when learning glass-blowing over the next 12 years, besides
learning that you will never really learn it, there will always
be more, is to demand that someone acknowledge what you've done each
time you've done it. Glass-blowing is hard! If it
isn't, you picked the wrong activity. Therefore when you finally, against
all odds, get a glass thingy to actually turn out like a glass thingy,
you must announce, 'look I've made my first glass-thingy!' It
doesn't matter if your wife or whoever doesn't know jack about glass-blowing,
announce anyway. 'I've made a glass-thingy!' If the glass-blowing teacher
is around, announce it to him or her. Force them to admit that you've
made a glass thingy. If anyone should appreciate this it's a fellow
glass-blower. Don't ask them if it's good - fatal error! That's
not the point. The point is that in spite of massive evidence indicating
you would never be able to do it, you did it.
You don't need to
know if it's good. Good is beside the point. Finding out from someone
else that it's 'good' is worse than useless if you didn't actually go
through all the steps of learning to know that you did it. If you faithfully
struggled with frustration, inspiration, taking a new tack, trial and
error, and burning your hands - you don't need anyone to tell you whether
it's good. You know. You know exactly what the process entailed and
what it means to you. No one can take that away from you. And fuck 'em
if they try. No one can accuse you of being an imposter glass-blower
at this point - because glass-blowing is hard and you've made you're
first thingy! If the glass-blower teacher says 'ah, very good, you've
reached the first milestone. Now the real learning begins,' curse them
for pulling that Zen master attitude and be enormously grateful. You've
just found yourself the dad you always wanted. Why do you think
Zen masters exist in the first place - Dad module!
You will be so damn
happy once you have divorced the accomplishment of doing from the tyranny
of 'is it good, is it worthwhile, does it count.' You will know you
have done something, because you'll have done something. Now aren't
you glad you have me to explain these things to you? Of course you
are.
The other major
reason for problems with the teaching dad module, besides a dad who
hasn't properly learned how to learn and therefore can't convey it -
is a dad who has learned the wrong things.
For example, I knew
a man once whose father wanted rather desperately to teach him how to
get roosters to put little spurs on their feet and kick each other
to death. For some reason, the kid was just not into this. This
proved a bone of contention between them for the rest of the cock-fighting
dad's life. The dad was severely disappointed and the kid wasn't all
that happy either.
If you really don't
want to know exactly how to skin a cat, kill New Zealanders, or run
a New Jersey crime family, then you will need to bail on the dad that
wants to teach you these things. This will be tremendously disappointing
for both of you, but you gotta do what you gotta do. If your dad is
dangerously insane, permanently incarcerated, or otherwise battling
circumstances severely incompatible with your own, a certain wariness
is in order. Although the content of what you learn from your dad theoretically
doesn't matter, the process of learning how to shoplift will alter your
life, very possibly in a shop-lifting direction. If a shop-lifting
type life is not exactly what you have in mind for yourself, it is the
greater wisdom to forego detailed instruction in this art.
On the other hand,
if this is exactly what you want to learn - go for it. One of the primal
lessons dads often teach, accidentally or on purpose, is that society
is a big fat liar. Society will tell you not to take risks, or be
aggressive, or will tell you to follow all the rules, be patient, and
so on. Society will tell you that you will be rewarded for doing what
it's telling you to do, or for not doing what it's telling you not to
do. Frequently society is um, kind of fibbing on this. Dads are great
conduits of the knowledge, passed down from generation to generation,
that society is full of shit. Lots of people are doing the things
it's telling you not to, and not doing the things it tells you that
you should do. And they are doing just fine thank you. The important
thing is not getting caught.
When it comes to
this sort of thing your task is to adequately understand, by looking
very closely at your own dad's results, exactly what not getting caught
entails, and how well it all actually works out. For example, if
your shoplifting dad gets caught and goes to jail and yet continues
to profess to you that everything is fine and theft is the only way
to go - it behooves you to closely at his results and assess for
yourself whether a lifetime in jail is actually fine. On the other hand,
if you jump into the river naked at your dad's behest and swim around
in it for 45 minutes and nothing terrible happens even though both of
you are well aware that ordinarily people are expected to wear some
sort of clothing during public outdoor activities, well then you've
learned that sometimes it's just worth the damn risk.
It's helpful to
assess for yourself what sort of harm results, if any, from breaking
the rules, and to who, and whether or not that harm makes you feel bad.
If it does, the fact that your dad is all for it doesn't make it any
better for you in the long run. Many people face this dilemma.
Being taught things by their dad that they're actually hugely uncomfortable
with.
If this happens,
and you learn, for example, by diligent practice to repress all your
emotions even the really nice ones, it may turn out that this habit,
clever and expedient though it seemed when you were learning it against
your will from your dad, is proving to be a major impediment in your
quest for world dominance now. It turns out people like to see some
fire from their leaders or what have you.
God knows there
are all kinds of tedious things you can accidentally and involuntarily
learn from your dad in childhood that prove later to just be stupid
and inconvenient. Happens to many people, if not most. Your dad taught
you never to talk about money, with the inconvenient consequence later
that you don't know a damn thing about it. A serious oversight considering
it is a fairly important topic.
If this happens,
you are, I am sorry to report, going to have to tediously unlearn
whatever it was you tediously learned in the first place. 'Intimidation',
you will have to repeat to yourself innumerable times, 'is not the only
key to success.' Sometimes this is fun and easy when you finally realize
you simply learned the wrong damn thing, and sometimes it is hard and
time-consuming. Sometimes you can merrily say - thank god intimidation
is not the only key to success, I never liked doing it anyway, it's
so damn time and energy consuming. And you can happily ditch it and
cavort about winning friends and influencing people with persuasion,
always your favorite thing anyway.
Sometimes though,
you will have to learn something that seems tremendously difficult,
like how not to smile all the time when you're nervous. Your
dad was a salesman, a nervous salesman and he taught you to 'Smile!',
which was difficult since you don't like salesmen, selling things, or
people who buy things that can be sold. But you learned it and now you
are finally realizing that the result of this is that everyone thinks
you're a big fake and wonders why a research scientist with a Ph.D.
in chemistry always tries to act as if he was at a hula hoop convention
or something. People think you're weird and fake and they don't
like you really.
So then you have
to learn how not to smile, which is hard, because smiling is a habit.
So you have to painfully figure out what you can do with your face instead
and suffer through a certain amount of anxiety as to what will happen
when you're not fake. But the process of unlearning is just like
the process of learning, you just do it step by step. You dismantle
something. And dismantling things is always fun. If your idea is that
you have to smile or someone will shout at you 'cheer up!' then you
dismantle that idea. You assess how often that will actually happen
and what you will do about it if it does, and whether you really care
or not. You take apart the idea and look at it and decide what other
kind of idea you like better, if any. And then you practice not smiling
the way other people practice playing the piano. You get the hang
of it eventually. Doesn't kill you. There may certain times during the
un-smiling process when you wish it would just so you could be put out
of your now unsmiling but tremendously uneasy misery, but it won't.
May bother you that you have to learn something simple at the age of
42, but it doesn't kill you.
Meanwhile,
the teaching module is actually just a precursor to the far more mysterious
and impactful, etching module, so stay tuned.
more on dads...and
this time they're scary...
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