flâneur

How to instantly be better at things - by Cate Hall

usefulfictions.substack.com · 1,920 words · saved by 6 readers

This post is an excerpt from my forthcoming book. I’ll be running a few excerpts here in the next couple months, in hopes of getting feedback on the kinds of content people are excited to see in the book (which tells us what to expand or scale back). Let me know what you think! It’s a funny quirk of the human condition that sometimes simply asking, of a given task, “how would someone much, much better than me approach this?” immediately makes you better at it. Like, right away. Weird! It shouldn’t be so easy. But sometimes it is. Let’s say I’m applying effort to keep up in a conversation that’s a little awkward. There is a pregnant silence, and I think, ah, what should go in that silence? Maybe I could ask an open-ended question, or tell a short amusing anecdote about my recent life. After quickly flipping through a few possibilities, I settle on one and utter a few words. They work fine, but there’s not that effortless fluidity of real skill. And as a result, the conversation remains

This post is an excerpt from my forthcoming book. I’ll be running a few excerpts here in the next couple months, in hopes of getting feedback on the kinds of content people are excited to see in the book (which tells us what to expand or scale back). Let me know what you think! It’s a funny quirk of the human condition that sometimes simply asking, of a given task, “how would someone much, much better than me approach this?” immediately makes you better at it. Like, right away. Weird! It shouldn’t be so easy. But sometimes it is. Let’s say I’m applying effort to keep up in a conversation…

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