I don’t know if you have ever been out rowing, but it is a beautiful sport. It is popular to exercise early in the morning when the sun is still tucked away and the cold air makes you ask yourself every day why you are doing this. But then you get into the boat. The first strokes seem a bit heavy. The boat is not set and flops around. Your fingers are so cold they can barely hold on to the oar handles.
Soon the rhythm picks up. Your heart beats faster and the blood moves around to warm up the body. The rate of the stroke picks up and there is this feeling with every stroke - a feeling of unison as the boat surges, the oars turn in their oarlocks feathering after every stroke, and the boat gliding smoothly on the water.
There is that groove that you find in your mind. There’s that place where you can focus and things feel effortless but powerful and quick. Sometimes as you try and learn to row and improve your skills you focus on the small pieces: drive with the legs first!, square up the blade when the hands cross the ankles!, sit up with chest and head high!. The sound of these mantras remind me of ways to improve but sometimes I take the opposite path - and focus on nothing; well not really nothing, but focus on just being there and row with the intention to be perfect, powerful, and fast, but so relaxed that I don’t care what actually happens stroke to stroke. I observe it, intend to be powerful, fast, and relaxed, and then try and put my mind back in the groove.
This is nice and all; but if it only weren’t for the waves. Today’s row was 80 minutes steady state and when I got out on the lake I was greeted by waves. Waves, water-skiers, whatever - they are all the same. They are distractions and interruptions from me making the perfect row. They toss my boat around, make it hard to keep the boat set so I can row a powerful stroke. But sometimes it's not the waves on the lake that are causing the problem, but the waves in my mind.
The waves give me an excuse - maybe an excuse to cover up some bad rowing technique - maybe a justification - that’s why my stroke is not good! The waves are an obstacle - I sometimes feel I can’t row as fast or as quick through the waves.
But I feel the waves are more of an obstacle in my mind. When I am relaxed and calm, it doesn’t matter how big the wave is. Today for some of the strokes I felt so relaxed that keeping my hands low and the blades feathered for just the right amount of time over waves with 4-6″ swells came instinctively. Other times today even the moments of most calm water did not help me as I kept flopping the boat from side to side.
I’ve realized that the times when I am focused on that point inside me and feel relaxed and like I can sense everything around me, those are the times of the perfect strokes regardless of what the water is doing. And when my mind is thinking about a startup idea, or what I will be doing after the row, that is when my stroke is off and the power, relaxation and speed falters.
So what then is skill acquisition? It is not simply the act of seeing some activity performed, “learning it” and then doing it yourself. It is two major parts: first, internalizing the activity in order to create in yourself a vision of what that activity might be like and second, removing the “waves” in your mind that keep you from performing the task. It is not about experience. It is not about any specific methodology of acquiring that skill (reading, school, etc). While all of these can be useful, they are only a means to internalizing the activity and creating a vision inside yourself of what it is.
So keep an eye on the waves, but don’t be afraid of them, they will pass if you let them.
