Week 2023#18: get a tutor

If you only take away one thing from this: get a tutor for a new skill you want to train after you have acquired some basic "vocabulary" in that skill

The last time I spent as much time awake during the three hours it’s dark in Tallinn as this week was 10 years ago.

What I’ve learned

Getting a tutor for a new skill you are training accelerates your progress massively

One of last week’s highlights was this:

I got closer to somebody who makes me feel things I’ve never felt before 🦋

This week I learned how to turn 🦋 into ⚡.

This had a couple of consequences:

• suddenly I felt…a lot of energy and want to make progress on all my projects,

• all at once,

• now.

The now bit is important because since Wednesday I’m making a conscious effort to live more in the moment.

I know that this is probably the thousandth time you are reading about “living in the moment”.

After a couple of days, it feels a lot like the practice of mindfulness, and it is a skill that needs to be trained.

In any case, it led me to do a lot of things, late at night, four days in a row.

Specifically, it made me break down high-level desires into actionable steps that I can take now.

Examples:

• “Life is short, I enjoy learning Hungarian right now and should go to Budapest soon to practice” → call a Hungarian friend right now and schedule a time to meet,

• “I want to be able to dance Salsa, in order to have more ways of enjoying life” → write the last Salsa teacher with whom I had a good experience and schedule a private lesson.

The Salsa lesson actually ended up being the next day already.

This felt great: these two things alone generated a lot of momentum, which made me more excited, which made me do more things, and so on.

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, in turn, all became extremely long days, because they were so packed with activities that it felt like time expanded.

As if I managed to live for two weeks in the span of one.

That’s enough for context this week, back to why you should get a tutor:

In the one Salsa private lesson I took, I learned more than in the 5 weeks I went to my previous course.

Group courses aren’t bad, they especially are useful at the beginning when you don’t have even basic skills and are lacking the basic “vocabulary” of the skill to even make sense of what you are experiencing.

But once you’ve passed that point, getting a tutor who actually teaches you directly, reacts to your mistakes, and addresses your strengths and problems really seems to make a 10x difference in terms of progress.

Obviously, the next thought after this insight is:

What other skills do I want to develop right now that would benefit from taking a tutor?

While right now there are quite a few skills that I’d like to develop, I’m not sure which of those would benefit directly from taking a tutor.

I have a hunch that it’s mostly those where it’s possible to give immediate feedback after performing the skill.

This week brought many insights, but this is the most-shareable one and this issue is already long enough as it is 🙏

Expectations vs Reality

Goals for week 18:

• Kickstart two mentoring relationships at work: yes! We started two mentoring relationships and having a step-by-step guideline for this really took the stress out of it. Things are off to a promising start!

• Schedule my first Mindvalley event: yes! It will have happened already by the time you read this: a deep work session at 7am in the morning to work on your own projects before working for other people.

• Bring all citizenship documents to the German embassy: almost! The “all the documents” bit is done, but the first available appointment was on Monday the 8th of May.

I’m not sure yet how to reconcile “goals” with “living in the moment”, so for now instead of goals, I’ll call them “directions”:

• Gardening: every time I visit my garden, it’s improving a little. I’d like to continue with that next week.

• Momentum: building momentum last week was a ton of fun and created many new memories. It would feel great if this carried over into Week 19.

• Saying “yes” to opportunities outside my comfort zone: this made every single day since Wednesday great, so again: more of this, please!

What happened

Highlights of last week:

• I left my phone in flight mode on Saturday and the first time I became aware of what time it is, was at 20:34. Awesome experience! I just went with the flow from one thing to the next.
  
  The flow led me to interact with over 30 people that day.
  
  Yes, I counted them because it felt like “a whole lot” and I was curious about what “a whole lot of people” means for me personally.

• I said “yes” to going to a karaoke bar on a Thursday night at midnight, got home around two and even managed to capture on video the last few brave snowflakes trying to keep winter here.
  
  Was I tired? Yes
  
  Was I feeling uneasy about singing in front of random people? Yes
  
  Did still do it? Yes!

• Saw "Oopus” live, didn’t know anything about them before, and had the best live music experience in my life so far (thank you Kristýna for convincing me to stay!)