“Breathe,” the yoga master on my TV says in the most calm, soothing voice you can possibly imagine. “Feel deeply into your body. In through your nose, out through your mouth. Move with your breath. Breathe only through your nose. You can do it.”
Cut to me, lying like a dead roach on my extra-thick yoga mat, heaving for air and straining to get my body remotely close to the pose we’re supposed to be doing without straining. You know the hardest thing about yoga as a big guy, in all honesty? It’s not that I’m inflexible (which I am) or that the small, balance-y muscles you need for yoga are as underdeveloped in my body as arms on a snake (which they are). It’s that every yoga pose where you bend forward or twist or whatever involves somehow maneuvering my belly out of the way or squeezing it beneath my folding body like a nut in a nutcracker.
Nobody on screen, the experts who created this yoga routine, has ever considered that problem. If they’ve ever had a belly softer than a wooden cutting board, it was probably so long ago they can’t remember it. And so they continue planning their routines to loosen and lengthen and whatever else, while I continue stretching the skin and fat on my midriff as if it’s a muscle.
Yoga is great for your body, but the people who need it most – large, stiff people like me with the torso flexibility of an old petrified tree stump – are the least likely to be teaching it or designing the programs used by beginners. And that makes sense, but all the “modified versions” of yoga poses in the world can’t really make the program fit my needs as a beginner. I need a yoga program designed to get flexible enough to do regular yoga poses. I need to learn from someone like me.
And I get it, it’s impossible to have a custom instructor for every beginner’s situation. That’s not what I’m saying. But it got me thinking about all the other things I’m trying to learn, and how I could sometimes use some other beginners to learn with, perhaps even more than I need another expert to ape. But then again, nobody really wants to watch my dumb ass flailing around on a yoga mat pretending to teach you something.
Maybe it’s more accurate to say I need some other beginners to take inspiration from, or encouragement, or simply to judge myself against, which as toxic as that judgment can be it’s nonetheless an urge all beginners have.
Perhaps there’s not an instructor out there for every beginner’s specific situation, but there’s definitely another beginner out there just as bad at this as I am. They might be the perfect person to inspire me to keep going, if for no other reason than to no longer be a beginner anymore.
I’ve got a few theories about learning. There’s nothing that academic about them, as far as i’m aware. They’re built around a life of chasing hobbies and learning new things, which is my biggest passion in life. For the purposes of this post I’ll call the sum of my armchair theories about learning the “bottoms up” theory, and it doesn’t have anything to do with drinking unless you want it to.
I’m addicted to new hobbies because each new pursuit is something I get to learn. And if the actual act of learning gets you going, as it does me, then logically teh best way to chase that high is to start something you know nothing about. Where you’ve got the most left to learn. The journey from 0% skill to 75% skill is the most entertaining for me because there’s the most to learn, the highest concentration of little breakthroughs. It’s a process I’ve repeated dozens of times: guitar, writing, piano, swimming, cooking, golf, photography, yoga, and who knows how many others.
So here’s my theory: the main thing you need to learn something isn’t intelligence. It’s motivation. But that motivation has to be the right kind. I think you need a mixture of “top-down” and “bottom-up” motivation to achieve most goals. You need the yoga instructor on the screen showing you what’s possible for some people, and you need a fellow beginner showing you what’s actually possible for you, today, here and now.
First, you need your “north star,” the inspiration or vision of what you’ll be able to do or what you’ll know or how great you’ll be at something one day. This is the “top down” motivation, the imagined version of the view you’ll see when you scale the mountain. But second, and more importantly, you have to have the “smaller” motivation to go sit in the chair or jump in teh pool or pick up the instrument. In other words, you need an approachable, realistic, and practical next step towards your goal.
You need to have an idea of the next step at all times. If you master one step or sub-skill, you need to find what’s next pretty soon or you’ll lose momentum. But if you consistently find an approachable, realistic, and practical next step, you’ll keep learning and your journey up the mountain will continue.
All the while, of course, you should have your “north star” vision guiding you and motivating you. But that’s a different kind of motivation, and it’s not the kind that will actually keep you going, keep you learning. It might keep you dreaming when things get hard, but if it doesn’t eventually lead you to your next practical step, a dream is all but useless.
To put it another way, your north star is your vision of your quest from the top looking down. You envision yourself at the pinnacle of your potential, and you imagine what that will feel lke. This is the kind of motivation that many people spend their time focusing on. And it’s understandable; it’s fun to imagine yourself with a guitar in your hand on a big stage, audience going crazy as you show off your chops. or watching a Youtube video of a great pianist, envisioning yourself playing those songs just as flawlessly, maybe to impress your friends or a bunch of strangers at an airport with a public piano. or for me, a north star might be turning on a yoga video and imagining being able to sit cross-legged.
The second ind of motivation, then, is looking at the learning journey from the bottom up. Maybe you find a good song that’s not too hard for you to play on the piano, and even though it might not be TikTok worthy, it’s doable for you and pushes your limits just a bit further. Or maybe you’re trying to swim a mile, and you go from 0.5 to 0.6 miles in a workout, setting a new personal record. Those little milestones, the incremental successes, are your bottom-up motivators.
This balance, the combination of top-down and bottom-up inspiration, is what has kept me going as I learn each new hobby. It’s extremely powerful. In yoga, since i’m kind of a unique type of beginner, with lots of strength but no flexibility, I was missing my bottom up motivation. But when I found it (I wasn’t joking about my goal to sit comfortably cross-legged) my progress became more sustained and consistent.
Another example: I’ve spent the past 1-2 years learning everything I could about photography. It all started when my wife and I finally planned a big vacation we’d been saving up for, one that would be an extremely epic photo-taking opportunity. I got a camera a year before the trip, practicing around the house and in my hometown so I could be ready for the trip. I wanted to get good enough to take decent pictures without spending half the trip looking down at my camera and fiddling with the settings because I didn’t know what I was doing.
The trip was a safari in South Africa, and if you’ve ever seen safari photos, you’ll know that there are literally millions of outstanding photos of lions and wildebeest and giraffes out there, from professional photographers and amateurs alike. So finding my top-down motivation to learn photography was extremely easy (which I think is one of the few decently OK things about Instagram, if used correctly). I had an album of my favorite leopard photos, inspiration for how I could frame the shots, edit them, all kinds of mood boards. These were my vision of what the top of the mountain looked like. But I, like many aspiring photographers, had no clue how far I was from reaching any level of photography skill.
As anyone who’s approached photography as a newbie will appreciate, there’s a lot of noise out there about how to get started. Most of the beginners on the internet seem to consider your choice of gear the most important factor in photographic skill. Experienced photographers maintain that it’s all skill, nothing to do with your gear or how expensive it is. Beginners post their photos online and get roasted for their lack of skills. Experts post their photos and get asked “what camera do you have” instead of “how did you learn to do that?” It’s a mess, everybody seems to be angry, and nobody really understands each other – experts have no clue how to explain things to beginners, and beginners who actually want to learn have no clear path to get past the beginner phase.
What I really needed in photography, I realized, was a set of peers to learn from, others who were beginning their journey and knew what I needed to focus on. But taking advice from beginners on the internet is even dumber than listening to so-called experts.
I eventually found other beginners to learn with in the form of some friends with cameras who were at a similar, casual level of their photography hobbies. I took the knowledge I’d gained from books written by experts – the terminology of aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and so on – and applied them in the limited way that a beginner should. I took pictures to experiment, learning that 10,000 terrible pictures are just part of the learning process. Eventually, I got a little better, and I learned just how far away I was from taking photos for National Geographic. Those are all critical steps for beginning photographers, in my opinion.
But it seemed so stupid that I couldn’t easily find the basic lessons I’d learned anywhere on the internet. The online world of photography content fell into certain categories:
- Experts writing good advice behind a paywall (books, courses, etc.)
- Experts (and idiots) sharing hacks and tips freely on social media, motivated by views rather than actual knowledge sharing
- Beginners at the peak of the Dunning-Kruger “Peak of Mt. Stupid” sharing overconfident but questionable advice
- People of all skill levels showing off their work as if it’s hanging in a museum
It seems that beginners with a levelheaded approach were too shy to share their experiences, or the algorithms that powered my searches didn’t consider them authoritative enough to show me. There’s literally no such thing on the internet as a beginner sharing their real experiences – everyone wants to jump straight to expert level so they can share their wisdom with the world.
I believe that has to do with the over-obsession on viewing photography from the top down, and not enough focus on the bottom-up view. We picture the end of the path so obsessively that we can’t find where it begins.
And to complicate things even further, social media only encourages people at the Peak of Mount Stupid to broadcast their achievements just like they’re masters themselves. So even our top-down inspiration sources are now polluted with imposters.
I thought about this phenomenon a lot, and it’s cropped up over and over in other hobbies. I’m also learning to play the piano – but have you ever looked up piano players on social media? They’re all like rapid-fire classically trained robots playing songs an AI would have trouble keeping up with. Guitarists are the same, shredding their fingers o to one-up the other. There’s no musicality, no soul, just showing off and trying to out-epic the algorithm – OK I guess those critiques are beside the point. Back to my theory, the only kind of inspiration you see on music social media is the top-down kind. The idea of these folks coaching beginners seems ludicrous to me – the memory of learning to play middle C or how to finger a G chord is so far in the past they probably think they were born with the knowledge.
You just don’t see beginners sharing their learning process often enough. That’s just not romanticized at all in our society – if people gave a shit about the work and process that’s required to master a skill, everyone would be sharing their process. But people focus only on the end game, the top of the mountain, and in doing so many things get lost.
And I guess there’s some sense to this. Nobody wants to read a book about how to playbasketball from someone who’s never played at a high level. You’d never hire a tennis coach who got cut from their middle school tennis team. Experts are valuable, and in theory can accelerate our eorts to follow in their footsteps by sharing their wisdom. Experts are and always will be an important part of learning new things.
But going back to my 2-part motivation theory – experts, their example and their knowledge and guidance, can only represent the “top-down” side of motivation. They’re (ideally) beneficial gurus looking down from the top of the mountain, sharing tips where they can, and ideally clearing a path to make the climb slightly easier. But too often they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be at the base of the mountain looking up – they’ve worked too hard and for too long to remember what it was like before their work began.
So the “bottom-up” side of motivation is missing in popular culture and media. My ideal version of “bottom-up” inspiration in photography would be a widespread focus on developing photographers sharing their work and their struggles as they educate themselves. That information would benefit me immensely – it would show that there is a long way to go, but that there are smaller, more meaningful steps that I can take to improve. Instead of looking at an expert’s final product, I’d rather see a middle-range photographer’s gradually improving work, their process and struggles, their small breakthroughs that I can implement in my own work. In piano I’d like to see people playing basic songs that are approachable to a beginner like me instead of masterful renditions of Chopin. In golf I’d rather watch someone hit a terrible shot and share the process as they try to figure out why than watch a professional make a hole-in-one. Only focusing on the best of the best might satisfy an observer or a fan, but it’s not enough for a learner.
I think we all know that neither of those wishes will come true in the internet world. Of course you can find these kinds of peer learning environments if you look hard enough – classes and learning groups are a thing for a reason – but my point is that the larger scope of society, as represented by the social media-adjacent ways the majority of people rely upon for their learning, isn’t focused on the bottom-up aspects of learning. We romanticize only what the uninvolved observer wants to see – the big moment is far more exciting than the work that led there. And so we forget, as a society, how dicult yet approachable it is to become great at something.
We see the end of the journey, and assume the first step is something reserved only for afew talented folks. What I want, and what any beginner needs, is the knowledge that the first step is actually the easiest one.
On Gatekeeping
As a slight aside, I imagine some people might celebrate the phenomenon I’m describing. I mean, who cares about beginners, anyway? We should focus on the best of the best, and keep the riff-raff on the sidelines where they belong.
This attitude is understandable from a certain perspective – experts have had to fight off competition for years to reach the top of their fields, and it makes sense that they would see newcomers as threats. But this is also problematic. It’s like if the first people to summit Everest put up a fence instead of ropes and handholds to help those coming after. If, in this metaphor, we place a value on more people reaching the summit, then putting up a fence is totally counterproductive. In the arts, by analogy, if the goal is to find more great artists, then making the path towards greatness harder is purely counterproductive. But if we decide that our priority is to glorify only those already at the top of the mountain, then lending a hand to those still making the climb becomes less productive to that goal.
There are logical reasons for gatekeeping-related goals, of course. If people in a field, such as famous musicians and the music critics who ride their coattails, decide their own well-being and exclusivity is more important than advancing the music industry as a whole, then gatekeeping becomes quite logical from their perspective. Or if they simply only see the top-down view of the music world and think they can improve things from the top with no regard for those at the bottom, then they aren’t incentivized to raise up others, instead preferring to focus on something like a trickle-down approach that so many of my parents’ generation seem to believe in but never actually works.
Both of these goals are misguided, from my point of view. Focus on the bottom-up view of the music world, for example, is what will actually yield more great music – not steering it from the top-down. If we allow those at the peak of the music world to shape it in their own image, we’ll lose the competition and varied viewpoints that invariably arise when there’s a popular musical uprising. If the music industry had ruled with an iron fist and stamped out upstarts, we’d still be listening to dime-a-dozen Brill Building music with no idea that the Beatles, punk, or hip hop ever could have existed.
Gatekeeping is counterproductive to good art (or good output in any other field), and it has no place in a bottom-up view of the world.
Just Bounce the Ball
Basketball oers another great analogy for the bottom-up theory (as do many other sports). A good basketball coach preparing his team for a big game won’t spend all of his time telling them to focus on the scoreboard, on lifting the trophy, on the victory parade. He’ll spend almost all of his energy on coaching the practical things – the plays they will run, the strategy they’ll use in certain situations, how they’ll create shots that are makeable and play good defense against certain players.
In other words, the most important message is “control the next play.” You hear this at the highest levels of every sport in some form or fashion. Focusing on scoring 100 points is totally meaningless – but focusing on making the next shot, running the next play perfectly, scoring the next 2 or 3 points, is something a player can control. The “peak” of this mountain is the scoreboard at the end of the game – this is the north star, an intangible vision to energize the team, but there’s nothing a player can directly do with that vision to help them achieve it. The only thing they can control is their next action, the next step up the mountain. Every great coach and player knows this.
You can extend the basketball analogy even further – for example, you might say “but the coach doesn’t tell the player to focus on every dribble of the ball or every movement of their body when they take a shot, right? So the literal next step isn’t really what he’s focused on?”
True, but remember, these are experts, and those actions aren’t necessary to focus on anymore. But think about when the basketball players were 3 years old; beginners. I can guarantee you that they were utterly focused on one thing – learning to bounce the ball. And when they did this, when they bounced the ball for the first time and took the next step on their journey, it was probably the most fun thing they’d ever done. 3 year olds love bouncing balls. And just like a 3 year old future basketball star, every beginner can and should find inspiration in taking even the tiniest step forward.
Nobody in their right mind would tell a toddler to focus on winning an NBA championship or dropping a triple-double. Even the most ambitious parent of a future basketball star would tell the toddler something approachable, realistic, and practical – “just bounce the ball!”
But how many ball-bouncing Instagram posts do you see?
So… How’s Your Yoga Going?
I’ve mostly gured out how to approach yoga, to be honest. I’ve found a bunch of little ways to measure my progress, and no matter how far I might be from doing actual yoga, I can come back to my small achievements to nd my bottom-up inspiration (Also, bottom-up inspiration is especially useful in yoga, when your bottom is frequently pointing up)
My first goal, for example, is to get flexible enough to sit cross-legged for ve minutes at a time without discomfort. Sounds easy to many people – for me it’s like trying to tie a steel rod into a knot. My legs have been lifting all my significant body weight for years, and they ain’t bendy. But to keep me motivated towards this super mundane goal, I imagine the usefulness of such a feat of flexibility. I’ll be able to sit on the floor and play with my nephews much more easily. The mundane goal becomes much more interesting when, 1) I have an exciting vision, a top-down goal to link it to and 2) I have a clear next step, a clear achievement I’ll reach.
But I’ve also decided that being a beginner is kind of shit on in today’s society, and that’s not OK. I’d never recommend any sane person to enter Reddit willingly, but if you ever go there and see how beginners asking any basic question are treated, you’ll see a microcosm of the entire internet’s attitude towards rookies. It’s either real experts looking down on newbies, fake experts defensively trying to tear down competitors, or Peak of Mount Stupid beginners peddling idiocy.
The internet isn’t real life. But it does sometimes oer insights into the broader population’s attitudes, and to me, this phenomenon of trashing beginners has parallels in real life as well, enough that I think it can be generalized.
We should be celebrating beginners, not discouraging them. And to do this, we should join them in focusing on the right kinds of motivation. There’s plenty of top-down motivation to be found; no need to focus our efforts on creating more visibility for experts. I think we should be focusing on improving the visibility of, acceptance of, and attitude towards beginners in all fields, on celebrating the little milestones, the bottom-up motivators that are the real reason beginners turn into experts. We should glorify the work just as much as the outcome. Those who are already masters of their craft should stop pretending to be overnight successes or that they have secret hacks the rest of the world can’t handle, and the world should stop believing those who say they do.
So I say we help beginners, and those of us who frequently find ourselves beginning new things should share the journey as much as possible.
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