It is now that I understand, after nearly 3 decades of experience in this world, why ‘showing up’ is the most important part of any creative or learning process.
I was going through Stanford’s online course ‘Code in Place’ to learn coding for my data analysis projects. Headed by two brilliant coding professors (Mehran Sahami and Chris Piech), the course is an excellent introduction for someone who has no prior knowledge of coding and wants to try their hands at it.
Midway through the course, Professor Chris Pieche talks about one trait in his students that he found to most significantly and consistently contribute towards successful outcomes.
It wasn’t intelligence, or background knowledge, or confidence, or self-esteem. Neither was it hard work, not exactly. It was tenacity, the quality of working persistently on a problem even if the solution does not give away easily. He said that the students who most succeeded at the end of the coursework exhibited an attitude of consistent effort, even if they weren’t good at the task in the first place.
Why do we even need to consider tenacity?
Tenacity can often be overshadowed by its more culturally prevalent cousin, ‘hard work’. Just take a look at these quotes:
‘Hard work beats talent’; ‘Work hard in silence, and let your success make the noise’– I do not need to help you recount the thousands of platitudes and adages on hard work that have been recited over the entire human history. Google provides enough results for the same. What I aim to present through this piece is a nuanced exploration of tenacity.
The issue of non-linear learning
Real world skill development is messy. There are significant periods of dormancy, confusion, frustration, mental blocks. Sometimes one has to back-track to some previous milestone, only to find that the whole thing has to be scrapped because the foundation was built wrong.
What differentiates tenacity from hard work is the consistency of effort on a task. Where hard-work entails the amount of effort, tenacity entails the consistency of effort.
Tenacity is different from hard work. It is not merely, granularly working on some particular task until you have brought it to an amicable conclusion. The notion of hard work presupposes that the result–or more importantly– the movement towards result is in any way perceivable; that there is direct visual feedback regarding the progress of the work. Hard work works(pun intended) well with something like going to the gym, or cleaning out the room. Every action undertaken has the provision of direct results being laid before the doer, either visually or physically.
So many people fail to understand, that failing to understand is a natural part of the process
There is something different to, or dare I say, greater to tenacity. It entails not the working incessantly on a task, but sitting with the task. There are many skills in the world that provide nearly no direct feedback against their progression towards mastery. Let’s take coding for example: many a times one is stuck with a problem that cannot be worked on by working more on the code. After a certain point, one merely finds themselves looking at the screen, at the blinking cursor, or at the lines and lines of code that seem to reveal no solutions upon looking. Writing is another example: it comes in fits and blinks of insights rather than a continuous process of progression. The writer sits in front of the screen, letting the insight prematurely formulate in his head, before laying it in words. Take mathematics too: the solving of problem entails more than just re-writing the derivatives and formulas that hold some key to their understanding.
In all these processes– that are so mental in their nature– the progression comes not in gradual series of success but in un-anticipated, burstful jumps of understanding and insights. What can you possibly work hard upon in such periods of dormancy? Hard work fails here. There is nothing to work hard upon, but to merely come back to the problem.
The importance of acknowledging the role of subconscious learning
So many people fail to understand, that failing to understand is a natural part of the process. That the mind, with all its intricacies and depths, holds more subconscious understanding of the material at hand, than one gives it credit for. That the task remains upon oneself to not blindly grind ourselves against it, but to come back to the problem from a fresher, distanced view.
It’s not that I am so smart, it’s just that I stay with the problems longer
Albert Einstein
Few of my most successful moments in these deeply mental acts came from the acknowledgement that the lack of visible progress does not mean that I am bad at the task, but that the mind has exhausted its resources in dragging all the material down to the subconscious, to build it and shape it to fruition. All I need is patience, respect to stay with it, and the tenacity come back to it again tomorrow. Come to think of it, the lack of tenacity is not an issue of self-esteem or self-confidence, but an issue of patience and respect.
Tenacity is about respecting the subconscious processes of the mind. It is the acceptance, that even if things fail to come together to some valid understanding in moments of confusion and frustration, some greater mechanisms are churning deep within the vast furnace of your mind, ready to spit out the eureka moment. All you have to do is to show up everyday to receive it. It can happen anytime: while you are stirring your morning coffee, or sitting in the summer heat watching two crows peck at a water pool, or– the most common of all– lying in your bed at night, trying to fall asleep.
anshul kandpal 