Only fun when you're good at it
Any time my students ask me when does it becomes fun, my answer is always when you get good at it.
In this case, it was soccer and they were total beginners. As you first start out, it’s not the best experience because you’re getting beat by others and people are yelling at you, and it’s an overall frustrating experience.
Some people like the sport from the beginning, but I’ve found that once you start seeing improvement, it’s a reliable factor that they’ll stick with it because it’s fun.
Why the beginning sucks… kinda
This is a bigger deal than it is if you’re starting something that puts you in competition with others. If you’re starting something where there’s no deadline, no tournaments, or instant demand to compete, then taking your time to figure it out and making mistakes is highly enjoyable.
When I first started Karate as a teen, they would have kumite, or sparring, nights where we could engage in controlled physical contact. I was pitted against a more experienced female and she did whatever she wanted to me. It felt like I couldn’t touch her, and whenever I thought I had the opportunity, she would move out of the way and deliver a counterstrike.
It was not only frustrating but incredibly humbling. I was obviously bigger, but with skill and experience, she bested me easily.
It wasn’t fun for my ego to keep losing over and over again. I even contemplated quitting because our skill gap seemed to be insurmountable. What I didn’t comprehend at the time was that I was getting better but so was she. In fact, she trained way more and I didn’t take it as seriously so there was no way I could close the gap.
The “aha” moment didn’t happen until new students joined. Now I saw the same mistakes I made when I first joined. Every movement was predictable and I got the better hand.
All of a sudden, classes were so much fun. I was improving, but it was hard to tell because they were improving as well. Improvement was not only addicting but made all the difference in my mood and attitude towards this hobby.
I was obsessed and did everything I could to get better.
That’s a lesson in sticking with something until you can see improvement. Once you can get over that hump, it’s going to be a continuous pattern of feeling like you stagnated and then seeing improvement.
Stagnation factor
It’s undoubtedly terrible when you hit a point of stagnation and the high you got from improvement fades. Then you’re back to not having as much fun as before.
It stems from the expectation that once you get better, it’s a linear line and you’ll just keep getting better. We don’t seem to factor in other variables like physical condition, better competition, everyone else improving, and such.
I look at stagnation as an opportunity to think and discover why I’m not improving as much. That’s definitely how it was when newer people at karate started to get more experience. Those sparring sessions became more difficult. I didn’t realize that people understood my patterns and behaviors. I was spamming the same moves and expecting a “win” every single time.
I had to incorporate setting up my opponents with feints or spar with a different type of rhythm to throw them off.
If you ever took a line dancing class or any classical dance like the waltz, it’s incredibly rhythmic and becomes predictable. Eventually, you learn that each movement has to follow a rhythm. It can be a 1–2–3, or a 1–1–2–2, but it follows a pattern that can be picked up.
Once you hit the stagnation stage, it’s time to switch up the rhythm.
Change it up
Some ways to switch up the rhythm include deliberate practice, entering a new environment, or just patience.
Deliberate practice forces you to work on an area — weaknesses or strengths and just do that over and over again until you understand it fully. My basketball coach would have a session where the only thing you can use is your weak hand, in my case, the left hand. Obvious failure happened, but we soon learned to be effective use it — by feints, passing more, footwork, and teamwork. You couldn’t move the same way and you had to think differently in order to pass and score.
Forcing yourself to develop just one skill is a challenging aspect as it forces you to “lose” often, but you’ll end up developing more in the long term.
Enter a new environment gives you a new perspective. It doesn’t mean quitting what you’re previously doing and giving up on the core fundamentals. It may mean, playing with other people, even with a new group, and testing out in a new “pond”.
If you think about it, if you practice with the same people day in and day out, you’ll end up understanding each other to a point where your best moves might get countered. You’ll get the same reaction. This isn’t bad, but they’ll also understand your second, third, and fourth moves.
By practicing with new people, you can test out how they react to things differently. Sometimes, you’ll find out that your skills do work, and that little confidence boost will affirm that you’re on the right path.
Just be careful not to stroke your ego and go against people who aren’t as good just to make you believe it’s fine. Challenge yourself against strong opponents in a new domain. Continue to ask the right questions.
Patience isn’t easy and it’s tough to say I’ll ride it out when it feels like you haven’t made any progress. The frustration can lead to you falling out of the hobby and leaving it.
I saw this the most at kid’s wrestling tournaments where some parents would make their kids wrestle up in age. The younger kids would get dominated by the more mature and physically developed kids. You could see the frustration that whatever they were doing wasn’t working. All of the pep talks and advice coaches were giving them did not have any success. Wrestling combines skill and strength, but sometimes, the strength gap is too much for skill.
I saw some kids just walk out of their matches, and some refused to wrestle. I understand wrestling is difficult and this will build character to go against adversity, but these are little kids. If you get dominated over and over again, wrestling isn’t fun. You need little wins here and there to keep it up and to progress.
If you asked who was having the most fun out there, I’d tell you it was the better kids.
I don’t blame them, winning is fun and contagious. Once you get a taste, you’ll do whatever it takes to keep winning. This includes improvement.
Continue to find little wins for yourself and switch up tactics to keep things fresh and not stagnant.
Fun is subjective, but to continuously progress is up to us. Continue to improve bit by bit for 10 or 20 years and you’ll see how much you have then.
Check out my last article on The Parable of the Plank*
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