Can You Actually Start Over? How to Leverage What You Already Know.
Quiz Time!
Which one of these sounds more difficult?
Learning how to ice skate - but you’ve NEVER been on a pair of ice skates, or
Learning how to do a triple axel - when you are already an expert ice skater
I suspect the couple in this image would disagree, but since I’m in the thick of learning the ropes of a whole load of brand new things from scratch right now - I’m gonna have to vote for #1, i.e. being a total Newbie, as the most challenging!
How I Didn’t (And Did) Get Here
It is always fun to hear what brought people to Substack to write. But I’m going to tell you what didn’t bring me to Substack.
I didn’t come to Substack after having a successful writing career on Medium (I only knew of Medium as those clickbait articles that I always want to read but never can because I’m not a paying member.)
I didn’t come to Substack after amassing a huge following on Twitter or Instagram (I don’t even use those, but shh don’t tell.)
I didn’t come to Substack after building up my brand on LinkedIn (Because I wasn’t thinking about building a brand.)
I didn’t come to Substack as a seasoned published author (Because I’m not that cool yet.)
I had recently left my 9-5 to ‘pursue other projects’ and was working on a book manuscript. I did research and learned that if I even wanted to consider taking a traditional publishing route, the publishers would be looking to see that I had some kind of ‘audience’ already.
Sigh.
I’ve never put much energy into social media, so I figured I better start somewhere… And voila, here I am.
Thankfully, every new venture comes with an early boost of enthusiasm, positive self talk, and over-confidence. The plan to write on Substack was no different.
“I learned to write when I was 5 years old. How hard could it be? Piece of cake!”
‘Know It All’ Doesn’t Know All, After All
But then I began to learn that publishing publicly isn’t only about, well, writing.
Ruh-roh.
I didn’t realize how important a good title was, or even what makes a title ‘good’? I didn’t realize how much the images used in an article can matter, or know how to generate quality images using AI?
I didn’t realize that because I’m not overly experienced in this whole publishing thing, I’d write 100 or even 200 words for every 50 that ended up in the final draft.
I didn’t realize how it would feel to pour my heart into an article… and then hear crickets after sending it out into the world.
Writing on Substack certainly isn’t the only new thing I am learning or working on right now, but the story is the same for all of them: there is a whole load of stuff that I didn’t entirely realize I was so ignorant about.
Wait! You Do Know Stuff
It can easy to take for granted the level of comfort we have in certain areas of our lives because we have known those spaces for so long.
I’m beginning to recognize how much I benefited from that comfort in most of my professional pursuits. This is a comfort that came from experience: years slogging through the trenches, often traveling in the dark, but eventually learning the way.
I don’t have anywhere near that level of experience in these new spaces, but I think there is a shimmer of hope on the horizon. Much of what we know can transfer from our comfortable spaces to our uncomfortable spaces.
If, we let it.
See, it isn’t that I knew everything in those comfortable spaces, far from it. I was constantly learning. But I felt confident in my ability to tackle huge projects, even when there was a lot of ambiguity.
I knew that it was ok to be slow, or to suck at things. But I also knew that if I wanted the thing to be scalable then I must continually seek a state of proficiency or a process that would allow for fast and consistent results.
I experienced new challenges as exciting, rather than as frightening things to avoid. I had learned that failure is rarely the end of the story, and that wins aren’t nearly as rare as we sometimes imagine.
I knew that complex problems often have complex solutions that reveal themselves incrementally over time. So I didn’t waste time looking for crisp, clean, golden solutions that don’t exist. Rather, I knew that the answer would be found, in time, by doing.
If I rolled all of these learnings into a nice neat package, it would be:
I knew how to be comfortable, even when I was uncomfortable.
If you too are in a phase of life where you are learning some new things from scratch, it may be worthwhile to pause and reflect on what you already know. You may have learned it doing something completely different, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful.
Empty overconfidence is icky, but take care to guard against convincing yourself that you are less equipped than you actually are.
That big scary new thing?
Pfft. We got this.
~ Rose G.
Nice post. Resonates a lot. I am learning to swim freestyle and just wrote a post about it. I do know how to swim breath stroke and am not afraid of water one bit, but I am still finding it very hard.
I have started over more generally as well, in that I quit a full time job, moved to a new country, trained to be a coach and split with my partner, in that order. Reminding myself that I have moved countries several times, started new jobs, learned new languages and also been happily single in the past, all help.
Here is my post on the challenges of learning a new swimming technique at 50, in case you are interested.
https://open.substack.com/pub/lizadebevec/p/learning-to-crawl?r=qclcq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
This resonates so much! Just started a career transition myself and have been pondering over the same question of what do I know and how can it transfer. Always nice to know one is not alone!