Simpedia

Mark M., New York

Metaphor I came up with today while coaching a student, expanding on the notion of working slowly to learn quickly.

Student wasn’t speaking instructions. I reminded. Student resisted, said it’s harder. I said, you know what? You’re right. It’s harder to do two things at once — speaking and playing — than it is to do one thing on its own — playing. But the point isn’t that it’s harder right now in this moment. The point is it’s an investment that helps speed up the comfort and accuracy of the playing, getting you where you want to go with less total effort over time.

This is when the metaphor came to mind, which I shared:

When a rocket is launched into space, it’s attached to one or more booster rockets. Booster rockets can be huge. For the Space Shuttle, there are three boosters that are even bigger than the vehicle itself. We might think, hey, aren’t these huge things going to weigh down the rocket? The answer is no. If the rocket doesn’t get to a certain velocity, it won’t be able to stay in orbit, much less escape orbit — it will just come back down to Earth. The rocket is not powerful enough to reach the necessary speed on its own. The huge thing with all that “extra” weight, the huge thing that seems like it’s going to slow down the rocket, is actually what gets the rocket to the speed it needs in order to do anything other than fall back to Earth. When the rocket gets to the speed it needs, it jettisons the boosters, doesn’t need them anymore, because, yes, at *that* point, the boosters are just unnecessary extra weight and an extra drain on fuel. But before that point, the rocket needs the boosters.

The point of our various tools and strategies isn’t to make things feel easier when we’re *first* learning them, in the moment, in the short-term. The point is to get us to our desired *end result* with the least amount of work possible — and that can mean working in a way that feels *harder* at first. That’s the making of an investment that pays off. If adding the booster rocket of speaking instructions makes the work feel too hard, that’s not a reason to jettison it. Quite the contrary: it’s a reason to add yet *another* booster rocket: we were going too quickly to effectively coordinate spoken voice with physical processing in hands/fingers, and so we need to add more mindfulness about controlling the events, working slowly to gain clarity about how to coordinate everything. When things start to flow, we can jettison the strategies — and if we do so and feel like things aren’t as clear as we’d thought, luckily, unlike for the rocket whose boosters have already started to fall back to Earth, it’s easy for us to just bring them right back however much until eventually we truly won’t need them anymore.