[2021-06-28] It's me―only better

In 2016, a colleague and photographer offered to create a professional headshot for me. Before I arrived, he set up the location, which no doubt took more time than the actual photo shoot. As he took pictures, we chatted casually. I made a joke and a few seconds later, he said, "That's it." "What's it?" I asked. "That's the shot," he said. It had taken him about five minutes to get the shot he wanted.

Several days later, after a little post-production magic, my colleague emailed me the final image. When I opened it, I gasped with delight, exclaiming: "It's me―only better."

That could be the motto of my life: "It's me―only better." I'm always striving to be a better version of myself. Indeed, much of what I read and write about focuses on self-improvement.

I've drawn significant inspiration for many of my blog posts―in both Café Jen and Jenesis―from things I’ve read. So I wasn’t surprised to see entrepreneur, author and blogger James Altucher include reading on a list of things to do to be great. In his 2015 article The Only Technique To Learn Something New, Altucher includes reading among his tips for becoming talented at something you love.

He shares the story of Bobby Fischer, the American chess player who defeated Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union to win the World Chess Championship in 1972. How did Fischer defeat the reigning world champion and end 24 years of Soviet domination of chess? By reading. Altucher explains that Fischer’s journey to becoming the youngest grandmaster in the world started with a year of reading: he studied every game played in the 1800s. Fischer also learned enough Russian to read chess magazines in that language since, at the time, the top 20 chess players in the world were Russian. (The story reminds me of Netflix's The Queen's Gambit.)

10 tips for learning something new

Altucher offers 10 tips for learning something new, prefaced with this advice: "Don’t force yourself to learn something if you don’t want to or it’s not a natural talent."
  1. Love it. If you don’t love the thing you’re trying to learn, says Altucher, you’ll never be as good at it as the person who does. Among the things Altucher loves is writing. "When I was 10 years old I wrote a gossip column about my fellow 5th graders," he reveals. I can relate. Writing has always been part of my life: I was a child poet, editor of my high school newspaper, a short story writer, a freelance reporter, a journalism school grad, a prolific diarist, and a bountiful blogger.
  2. Read it. The secret to Bobby Fischer’s success, declares Altucher, was reading. "Studying the history, studying the best players, is the key to being the best player." If your passion is writing, read books about the writing process, read biographies about great writers, read grammar and style guides. Anything that’s about the often arduous task of converting thoughts into words and stringing those words together into coherent sentences. Whatever your passion, your local library is full of books on the subject.
  3. Try it. It's not enough to read about something; we need to try it. Altucher advocates quantity over quality, at least in the early days of learning something. "The learning curve that we all travel is not built by accomplishments," he asserts. "It’s only built by quantity." My first blog posts were not especially good. But through 500+ Café Jen articles and another 300+ Jenesis posts, I’ve honed my writing skills through the sheer quantity of posts.
  4. Get a teacher. "For everything you love, find a teacher and that makes you learn 10x faster," suggests Altucher. For anything he tries to learn, he finds someone better at it than he is, sets a time each week to meet with that person, asks lots of questions, accepts assignments, and has his mentor tell him where he’s gone wrong. This is probably the single most overlooked technique for learning something. Many of us, myself included, think of things we’re trying to learn as hobbies we pursue on our own, as opposed to skills we’re trying to master. But whether it's learning how to bake bread, cultivate a garden or cope with cancer, I've found that having a coach or teacher is well worth it.
  5. Study the past and the present. "If you want to write better, read great books...that have withstood the test of time," recommends Altucher. Read the classics of the past and then read the criticism of those classics from the present. "If you want to study business, read biographies of Rockefeller, Carnegie, the first exchange in Amsterdam, the junk-bond boom, the 90s, the financial bust. Every Depression. All the businesses that flourished in every depression." My most recent read that fits the category is Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, a captivating book about the author's experience as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War.
  6. Do easy projects first. Altucher reports: "Ernest Hemingway never thought he could write a novel. So he wrote dozens of short stories." Similarly, on the way to writing a book (a lifelong goal I hope to realize one day), I have written the equivalent of many books, just in the form of blog posts.
  7. Study what you did. "If you aren’t obsessed with your mistakes then you don’t love the field enough to get better," Altucher argues. He relates that comedian Amy Schumer videotapes all her performances and then studies the recordings second by second. From his own experience, after a business he had invested in failed, he looked at everything that had gone wrong, everything that he had missed, and what he could have done differently. One of the most effective ways to get better at something is to acknowledge and learn from our mistakes.
  8. Surround yourself with people trying to get better at the same things as you. "People seldom get better as individuals. They get better as groups." Altucher points to examples of groups from literature to art to business. Top athletes often talk about the value of training with other athletes. And entrepreneurs benefit from hanging out with other aspiring business leaders. Why does this approach work? "You each challenge each other, compete with each other, love each other’s work, become envious of each other, and ultimately take turns surpassing each other."
  9. Do it a lot. "What you do every day matters a lot," advises Altucher. How many things in life can we say we do every day? Probably not many and probably not the things we most want to learn. That’s why one of the rules of becoming a writer is to write every day.
  10. Find your unique voice. When I was in journalism school, our profs discouraged us from using the word unique, insisting that few things are truly unique. I no longer believe that; we all have a unique voice that stems from our unique experiences. Altucher states that after following his 10 techniques for learning something, you will find your unique voice. "And when you speak in that voice, the world hears something it has never heard before."

Altucher concludes his article with these inspiring words: "Now it’s your turn to teach, to mentor, to create, to innovate, to change the world. To make something nobody has ever seen before and perhaps never will see again."

The "It's me" part of my motto recognizes the value of my unique voice. The "only better" part acknowledges that there's always room for improvement. I'm a work in progress.