“The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.”
In 1982, my mum bought a Sinclair Spectrum, and quickly got hooked on typing in the pages of code from magazines to create simple programs. She never really progressed beyond that, but it seemed to be enough to scratch an itch, and the Spectrum became another tool in my mum’s kit of meditative pastimes - knitting, needlepoint, gardening, baking.
Images: Ebay.co.uk
Our house in Selwyn Road, Edgbaston, which at the time belonged to the prison service (my dad was a governor, but spent 3 years working at the offices in Birmingham), had a box room tucked away at the back, separated from the main landing by a short corridor. My dad commandeered this space for his own cathartic hobbies - photography, painting, and ships in bottles (which he made from scratch, usually deploying the empty bottles from his Christmas and birthday whiskey gifts).
Neither of them ever sold anything, or exhibited anything, or shared the results with anyone. They just ‘generated content’.
For my part, I played Dungeons and Dragons, and I drew. Endlessly. My mum used to salvage scrap paper from the local council offices where she worked as an ESL teacher for immigrants from India (later graduating to young people with severe learning difficulties, which surprised me, as my mum was a lady of minimal patience and toe-curling bluntness). I drew, and drew, sometimes following instructions from books, but most often just copying stuff that I liked.
My fondest memories of home are those evenings where everyone was holed up in their space, beavering away at something creative; a liminal space between the social gatherings of tea time, and whatever was on TV at 9pm (Blackadder, Young Ones…).
Later on, I learned to play the guitar as part of a failed Duke of Edinburgh Bronze award (we trespassed on private land during our camping assessment and were struck off.). I had a few lessons from my then girlfriend’s father, who had played guitar with Dave Kaye and the Dykons in the 60’s. After we split up, I carried on teaching myself, moving from 60’s pop to Heavy Metal. As you do.
Dave Kaye and the Dykons
John Middleton, left, taught me my first chords.
My kids have, thus far, been unimpressed by my musical abilities and tastes. When the mood is right, we have a ‘songs you should know’ session during teatime, where I rack up important rock tracks on Spotify. My youngest has a liking for Megadeth and Standards. My eldest enjoys soundtracks.
However, the landscape changed when Fortnite launched a collaboration with Metallica. My kids were fascinated by the band, to the point that one Saturday evening found them eating tea on the sofa, watching Metallica’s rain drenched performance of Master of Puppets in Munich.
Off the back of this, my youngest started playing around with a crappy 1/2 size guitar that I found in a charity shop. My eldest had an electric guitar for his birthday a couple of years ago, but has failed to even touch it, despite spending 2 years in an after school ‘rock band’ class.
My Jackson has a totally Hair Metal reverse headstock and Floyd Rose tremolo, but it pales in comparison to the rock attitude of Spongebob…
I’m now riding a fine line. I’m super excited to share my interest in guitars and music with them, but I’m also aware that my enthusiasm could kill theirs if I’m too overbearing. I’m trying to find the time to just play, and let them come and ask me stuff if they want to. To lead by example rather than by instruction.
The problem is that, like my mum and dad, my hobbies tend to be things that I keep to myself. I mucked around in bands in my teens, and for the last 5 years or so, some friends and I have run an informal punk group, but for the most part, I play guitar just because I love to learn stuff. I’ve never really played in front of anyone, and I don’t feel the need to. My parents never heard me play, which makes me sad when I think about it, but I am who I am, and we are where we are.
So my youngest has started to tinker with the guitar, and we’re seeing a pattern of behaviour emerge that we saw with skateboarding, Tae Kwon Do, piano, flute, yo-yo, and 3D modelling…he’s strumming the guitar open - not creating any chords or notes on the fretboard - and repeating that action over and over. That’s cool. He’s just finding his way around the instrument, figuring out how hard to pluck with a plectrum. I’ve given him a starter guitar book, and he’s practiced 2 simple chords, but he’s abandoned that as too hard. “It feels un-natural to put my fingers on those metal bars”, he says. “Welcome to guitar”, I say.
My youngest suffers an affliction that I’ve often see in students over recent years. - the expectation that perfect execution of a task will arrive, Matrix-like, into their hands automatically. He wants to ‘play’ the guitar, rather than ‘learn’ the guitar. If I try to teach him, he becomes frustrated. If I leave him to it, he’ll lose interest because he can’t create a road map between where he is and where he wants to be. This damages his self confidence, and he gives up because he doesn’t think he’s any good. Frankly, he isn’t any good, but that’s because he only picked the thing up the day before yesterday. The jury is still out on whether he has any latent ability. Unconscious incompetence and all that.
I’ve been watching Dr Russel Barkley’s presentation on ADHD, and it’s been a bit of a revelation. My youngest displays some attributes of ADHD, primarily a tendency to get distracted and abandon a current activity, leaving it incomplete.
Rather than being an issue of attention span, Barkley suggests that this behaviour is a double punch of a) developmental delay in the ability to control stimulus response, and b) an inability to think forward in time to a goal.
Because my son can’t resist a distraction, he walks away from an activity, and because each activity is a ‘here and now’ experience, rather than steps towards a future goal, he doesn’t come back.
It reminds me of a poem that I first came across in the Stephen King novel ‘Insomnia’ (printed in full here, and read aloud at 2:56 on the podcast):
“Each thing I do, I rush through so I can do something else.”
My autistic eldest, on the other hand, simply has to be left alone when it comes to hobbies or skills. There’s often a year or so gap between him aquiring a particluar bit of kit, and him actually using it. Any discussion on the topic only serves to lengthen that period.
Keri Opai coined the phrase, ‘Takiwātanga’ as the Maori description for Autism. It translates as ‘In their own space and time’. My eldest should have this tattooed on his forehead, because it describes him perfectly. His most common response in any conversation is ‘I’ll have a think about it’, and that’s regardless of whether or not he was asked a question. My eldest will not be moved; my youngest abandons rational thought to race ahead.
I actually started this post intending to talk about the importance of effort in learning, but I’ve used up most of it talking about neurodiversity, so to get back on track just for a while…
Learning a skill takes time and effort, but it’s worth remembering that effort without results isn’t wasted time - when my son spends half an hour tinkering on his guitar, he’s within himself. He’s working towards a goal, but he’s also relaxing and clearing his mind. I remind myself that any engagement is good engagement, and that the goal might not actually be learning to play the guitar. It might be as simple as staying focussed.
I learned to engrave via an apprenticeship at the Royal Mint, which meant 2 years of often mundane and menial tasks, designed to embed basic understanding. ‘Serving time’ was considered a vital part of the learning process, although a pay dispute between 2 engravers, (based on an archaic notion that length of service trumped benchmarked skill as a valid reason for one being paid nearly twice as much as the other) changed the value and impact of that training time.
There’s a fab BBc4 documentary on the creative brain (still available here) that includes an experiment designed to show how mundane tasks ‘reset’ our creativity. I won’t describe it as the doc is well worth a watch all the way through.
One might be tempted to include scrolling through social media as a ‘relaxing ‘mundane task, but it’s not. I’ve just recently started using Instagram, having not really touched social media for a decade, and it’s surprised me how much 5 mins scrolling through other people’s stuff fails to feel like a break.
After so long away, social media feels un-fun, and not at all relaxing. Every good hobby has a ‘meta-hobby’ associated with it - the administration and tinkering that happens outside the core hobby activity; ‘Sorting and Choosing’, my wife would call it.
For me it’s mapping out adventures for D&D, or managing my inventories in Black Desert (which is so complex that I might actually put it on my CV.). These meta-hobbies bring us closer to the big goal of expertise in a skill or topic, but they also serve as meditative decompression from the hassles of daily life.
That’s the whole point of a hobby - to get good at something in a way that’s relaxing and fun. As opposed to getting good at ‘work’ stuff, which is often competitive and judgy.
My mum and dad understood this very well - my dad especially. He joined the prison service for practical reasons after leaving the RAF, and his work and hobbies dovetailed completely.
He’d come home from a day where he might have handled a riot, or a suicide (I know that one one occasion, he offered himself in exchange for a guard who’d been taken hostage by a prisoner), and spend the evening building a ship in a bottle, or painting one of his bizarre seascapes that were, due to his profound colour blindness, filled with exotic purples and greens, like a procedural planet from No Man’s Sky. He was comparmentalising - using his hobbies to decompress and pack away his tough day.
I often say that I’ve been fortunate to spend my career doing a job that I enjoy, but that’s not strictly true. I’ve spent my career doing something I enjoy because I’ve worked hard at it, and am (arguably) inherently suited for it. My good fortune lies in the fact that my work and hobbies entwine, and I enjoy activities that span them both.
We often see ‘work’ and ‘life’ as being opposite ends of a set of scales. For me, the opposing ends of that scale are ‘effort’ and ‘outcome’. It’s a way of viewing things that’s activity agnostic, so the effort doesn’t always pay off in the activity it’s attached to, but it does pay off.
I want to teach my kids this - to work hard at stuff they enjoy.
They probably won’t listen to me, but now that they are fans of metal, perhaps they’ll listen to another rock and roll icon:
“Have a good time, all the time”