YoYoing

Yo-yo God (Hiroyuki Suziki 2005)

'nuff said?

Expert Village Yo Yo Tricks: Basic thru Expert Includes counterweight!

Last Wednesday, my Advanced Topics class and teacher were surprised to find me yoyoing ferociously outside the door. It is one of the few activities that does not currently aggravate my RSI – I am making liberal use of this convenient fact to do it heavily. From this practice my reflections arose…Yo-yoing

Yo-yoing is a lot like learning a foreign language. It is also a lot like Rubik’s cubing. It is also a lot like math, poetry, art, and surfing. It is a lot like inventing because it is. First, you must put in hard work to master the basics. If you cannot sleep a yo-yo, you certainly cannot do a brain twister mount to triple mondial with a false drop and end. There is no excuse for a shoddy comprehension of the basics. The laws of physics grade on all or nothing scale. You do the homework or you drop out. The thing is, however, you want to do the homework because it feels incredible – natural even – to develop a familiarity with the device. It is almost as if I am subverting the innate ability to become interested in focused my ancestors required to wield bows and arrows and spears to hunt mammoths and fend off enemy tribes. They survived. They reproduced. They were the best of the best. The fact that I am here today proves that: they succeeded in transmitting their genes, their talents for building coordination without pain and undue effort. I’m programmed to consider the reward of gaining the skill as commensurate in value with the days of subconscious practice, mental and physical, that I put in. It is for the same reason that so many people go to the trouble learning to surf: even when failing, it is clear that we are learning – our repeated flops into the water are not in vain because they are not aimless and random: with each, we become more acquainted with the properties of the waves and boards.

It is less obvious in many other fields that working through pain and failure is worthwhile and rewarding. Thus, many people give up. But because I see these other subjects as analogous to yo-yoing, I stick with things a long time – I enjoy doing things wrong failing, and encountering unexpected hurdles because I know I’m learning. I love it when my computer has problems or a mechanical device breaks – it’s an excuse to learn more about how these fascinating machines work; I am being given an opportunity to increase the fluency of my understanding of them, and this is fun because it is incredibly cool to master every navigatory nuance of an art. Similarly, I find it enjoyable to get to the last step in solving a variation of a Rubik’s-style puzzle and to make a mistake: although I often lose my work, this is an extra puzzle, an extra challenge – am I skilled enough to dig myself out of this ditch? Do I understand my algorithms well enough or am I just repeating them out of muscle memory? If I do, it feels incredible, if I don’t I still learn (though I’m not immune to annoyance — it’s not very fun when you make such a mistake when going for a speed record; however, nonetheless, again understanding and do not make the same mistake the next time). (Also, I do not regret it when my computer crashes and I lose data because it gives be a chance to remake what I did better and more efficiently.) For this, I appear to be very persistent. But I know better: persistence is refusal to give up in the face of failure. I simply refuse to regard my mistakes as failures. They are fun and often lead to great discoveries!

So when I am stuck in a “boring” lecture, I realize that in a different light, it is probably something that I would be fascinated with. Ugh: simplifying ugly boolean algebraic expressions by hand? First of all I’m glad I put in the effort to learn because suddenly I can understand all the tricky details in people’s HDL code, but more importantly it feels good to exercise a strong mental muscle in the process of doing this. Although theoretical knowledge in the absence of an application is often difficult to palette, I realize that simply learning how to do it well and quickly is its own reward: like a yo-yo trick.

Furthermore, yo-yoing has built within me an ability to look ahead and plan sequences of steps that will be both efficient and artful. I put in the effort to choose meaningful variable names because in choosing accurate monikers I clarify my understanding of the algorithm that I’m working on. You cannot name something properly unless you fully comprehend every use it will be put to. The hallmark of an advanced yo-yoer – like an advanced surfer or advanced Rubik’s cuber – is not the ability to perform difficult moves in isolation but to string those and simpler ones together without wasting time to set up and think. You cannot get a higher score on a wave or a faster solve time unless you look ahead – far ahead – and realize that every action will have lasting consequences, realize that is futile to sprint ahead and begin something that you cannot finish or follow with another upon completion.

So is often noted that people are good at a lot of seemingly disparate things together. Tiger Woods was a star academic, the drummer from Queen is an astrophysicist, Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman was an expert safecracker. People marvel at these people who seem to be untouchable in the broadness of their tastes and interests. But I have found that ever since elevating a single skill — yo-yoing — to an elevated level, it has been easier to learn everything that I wish to learn, from computer science and mathematics to art to athletics to language – because in learning that one thing deeply, fully, properly, I gained not only that specific skill that but learned how to learn: to listen to what others say, to teach myself, and to keep trying forever is easy when one can become motivated without any real effort.

Now that I have something worthwhile, people ask me about it. When are, for lack of a better word, “awed” by anything I do or produce, I laugh at the irony: what they sometimes mistakenly believe to be some sort of unreachable talent or inborn brilliance is really just the result of me messing around with a child’s toy and having the boldness to think about what I’m actually doing as I play.

Re: “Success,” "Obsession," and learning to learn from Yoyo-ing and Cubing

I am not exceptional in any way. No, any skill and success I might have is simply the result of my ability to become — for lack for better word — “obsessed” to anything and everything that I desire to master. It probably started with yoyoing. I had always loved yoyos, but I was never particularly good with them. However, in middle school, I really became intensely fascinated with them, and resultantly “practiced” unconsciously in sleep and in my waking hours. Whether or not I had a physically yoyo with me, I could feel my subconscious thinking its way through the maneuvers and inventing. So every time I actually picked up the wonderful little gyrating device, my performance improved by a quantum leap. Around the same time, I became interested in Web programming. While I had always been interested in computer science, I knew little about this field and was excited by its potential. I was in middle school, and a couple of friends pointed me in the right direction and I launched. I found tutorials and examples online and read them and made my own modifications. I reverse engineered existing web sites, figuring out how to replicate and improve upon behaviors that I discovered in the “wild.” My skill level reached that critical threshold at which I was eligible for entry into professional world and, with experience, the skills that my yoyo-like obsession with the subject had seeded blossomed outwards.

This building skill positively impacted my understanding of other skills I was attempting to build. It was as if by mindlessly observing myself as I trained and grew, I taught myself not only the nuances of the subject but how to efficiently learn, how to efficiently teach myself. So suddenly, I found myself more academically successful than ever in fields from mathematics to biology to English to history. It was with the same open-mindedness and intent to get myself “addicted” to thinking about the subject,that I approached each new item and it was suddenly very easy to learn. Every waking and sleeping moment, with no effort on my part, my subconscious turned out mutations of questions I had. My skill level skyrocketed with relatively little conscious effort, and I overcame and outraced even many of those with pre-existing advantages.

So I entered high school and I then was the one with a head start, not only in specific skill areas, but again, in teaching myself. When I observed a bunch of people amazingly speedsolving Rubik’s cubes and other twisty puzzles in my AP computer science class (which I had skipped into as a freshman on the basis of my prior knowledge), I thought to myself “well, cool, I wish I could be able to do that!” And I envisioned the result and for the first time consciously applied my earlier technique. And I doubted myself – “No, people can’t modify the way they learn!” – all the way up until the point at which I found that I could suddenly, magically, do it. I had just put a bit of genuine interest — not an undue amount of practice or effort — and my brain had taken care of it for me. I had made the subliminal portions of my psyche “obsessed” with it and they in turn made all that they could of these reverberating neural patterns.

And every new skill I gained, every new subject I became interested in, every new book I read, broadened my horizons and increased my ability to learn and assimilate knowledge. Through speed cubing and memorizing and practicing algorithms, I learned the value and the joy of going to great lengths to finally master a skill. This, I realized was true of nearly anything that I wished to learn, be it math or history or english. I simply need to have the interest and dedication to overcome a certain threshold and suddenly I would accelerate forward of my own accord.

It is said that to become an expert at something, you must undergo 10,000 hours of practical experience. I have not found a way around this — my brain is not magically wired to assimilate information more rapidly. No, whatever’s going on in my head, thoughts pertaining to subjects that interest me seemed to echo in my brain and twist themselves around and etch themselves into my neurons over the course of every waking and sleeping moment and I simply log my 10,000 hours more quickly and in a different manner.