Resistance to learning something new

In “The Art Of War”, author Steven Pressfield talks about the concept of “resistance” as it relates to creative work, that writers/creators struggle to create and have to overcome obstacles (mostly self-induced) to create. I had the experience recently to have to learn how to use a tool for work, and to figure out some tool feature for personal use. In the work instance, I delayed installing the tool, because I knew it was take a significant effort to get up to speed. When I did try to install it, the installation failed, so I had to find an open source alternative. Then, I had to learn the quirks of the open source tool before I could use it effectively, which was a significant effort.

In the personal tool issue, I had three browser tabs with tutorials/examples waiting for weeks for me to look at it, but I didn’t. I just knew that reviewing those was not going to be enough, and that it would take several hours to get the understanding of the tool feature. I finally had some free time to invest in this tool over the weekend, and – sure enough – it took several hours of reading, searching, and running examples to get a basic understanding of the tool feature – ugh!

In these examples, I resisted getting started because I felt I would have to make a significant investment of time and effort. That feeling was proved out both times. For work, I eventually had to get that task done, so I had to work on understanding the tool. For personal use, I waited until I had the time and motivation to press forward with figuring out the tool feature. I guess I should have looked back at one of my previous posts to see that a way to make progress is to figure out a first step and then take it. I hope writing this down will help me in the future, and will help my readers as well.