Fall in Front of Others
How to lose yourself in order to come alive.
I grew up skateboarding. It was my escape plan. It took me places. I learned mastery from skateboarding. I learned to hide injuries from my father, cos’ the pain of the falls are less than the wrath of my father.
I recently watched a video of a girl learning to do tricks on a skateboard over a 12-month period.
It's incredible. It's like watching a time-lapse video of a plant grow. She made incremental gains, some bad falls, and also some giant leaps.
But what was striking was the recurrent comments made by others about the video:
I worry that we have been hyper-conscious. In literal ways, the mirror is overly-reflected back on ourselves (Read this:Point Your Camera to the World). We can't help but obsess about how our hair looks on a Zoom call.
An aside: This is also why if you are learning to practice a speech, despite conventional wisdom, the worse thing to do is to practice in front of a mirror. The focus isn't about you. It's your audience.
We all need to find a way to lose ourselves, and get deeply engaged into things that make us come alive.
Here's one my best mates, psychologist and ex-Navy officer, Neo Eng Chuan, learning to skateboard at age 57.