learning

Hard to soft

When I was in my early teens I found an old tennis racket and a few tennis balls in the garage and I played some tennis for a while.

Looking back it’s a bit strange that we’d have a tennis racket since I can’t remember one of my parents ever playing tennis. Actually I can’t even imagine one of them playing. It might be that my mother tried to get me to play with other children.

Anyway I started out with hitting a ball against a wall. I was very good at that. I could aim the ball at a specific point on the wall and get it straight back. I hardly ever had to step left or right to hit my ball.

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After doing that for a few weeks my mother suggested that I should join a tennis club which I did. From that point the problems started and very soon I lost all interest in the game.

At first we started with learning how to hit the ball over the net vaguely in the direction of your opponent. That was easy since that was what I’d been doing for weeks. The only difficulty was not to aim up.

Within a few weeks my teacher decide that I could go on with the next step. hitting a ball that was thrown from the other site of the net. Again this wasn’t very difficult. The trouble was that I lost the ability to aim. I’d hit every ball but they went all over the place. Mostly up. Almost every ball I hit went over the five meter high fence designed to keep balls in.

Even when I tried to do the game I started with, hitting balls against a wall, they went up on top of the building. Soon I run out of balls and lost interest in the game of tennis.

I haven’t hit a ball since.

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For the last one and a half year I’ve been learning how to play poker.

At the end of 2005 the BBC television had a news show about a poker site. I’ve always been the worst card player but I was curious as to how a cardgame would look online. But I wouldn’t spent a penny on a game like that.

But it turned out that you can play online poker for free. They have a “pay” button that will give you one thousand artificial dollars and when your run out you just press that button again.

So I tried it and within a few days I lost my free dollars and got some more. I went on playing in part because I had nothing better to do and in part because poker has a kind of logic to it that gives me a nice feeling.

Hunebed

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After playing for about six week I realized that although I hadn’t added new free money to my account for several weeks I had $5000.

Without paying any attention to what I was doing I had been winning money.

Off course at that point I thought that if it was that simple I should try playing for real money and winning some real money.

I tried and lost $50, went back to playing for free and again lost. How strange. Why would I loose while earlier it seemed so easy.

After some thought I realized that while playing for free you make your decisions on the bases of the cards you have in your hand. But when playing with real money you tend to also way the risk of loosing your money. Apparently that leads to different decisions.

So I went back to playing for free and I started reading a lot about poker in the hopes I would somehow be able to figure out what I was doing earlier.

After eight months of study finaly the penny dropped and I started winning again. This time I paid close attetion to what I was doing and a few weeks ago I decided that I had studied enough (and saved enough) to again try to play with real money.

This time was no different from the last. I started loosing all most immediately. Only difference was that I saw what the problem was. I recognized the problem as something I’ve had earlier.

It seems that after learning one skill I can only learn a second skill if I’m willing to sacrifice the first skill. Except that it isn’t really a choice. I can be content with having one skill or I can risk loosing that skill while I learn a second skill. When I’ve learned the second skill the first one come back. Only to disappear again – together with the second skill – while I learn a third.

You can imagine that as a child I didn’t like to learn new skills. While I was doing the best job I could teachers kept telling me that I should try harder.

My heart dropped. If I can’t learn new skills what about learning how to draw? Poker doesn’t matter. It’s just a game. But drawing is something I need. Without it I would be a mute.

Friday while strolling over a local market I remembered something.

Last year I first became interested in dyslexia. Someone told me something about it and I recognized some symptoms and started reading.

It seems that some people with dyslexia think in pictures. (Psychologist doubt that. Thinking in pictures is considered to be a symptom of autism.) Up till that point I’d never thought about how I thought. I thought that everybody thought the same way. My way. In pictures.

Although thinking in pictures has some advantages it also has some disadvantages. One of those is that people who think in pictures can’t learn by root. They learn by experience.

Which is true. I do learn by experience. One of the most important things I’ve learned over the last 20 years is how to understand people. I did it by utilizing something I learned in the IT. Systems analyses (Dutch:”systeem analyse” my dictionary doesn’t have a translation). I observed behavior and analyzed it. It took me years but nowadays I understand people almost as good as most neuro typicals.

So I can learn new skills but when I do it my way. By trying things and sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding. I’ll just have to take baby steps.

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Tennis (Drawing: Hard to soft)

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Baby steps (Drawing: Hunebed)

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