We need to talk about our bucket-list culture
Over the last few days, I have been having a conversation with my wife that we keep coming back to. This conversation was sparked by our thoughts on the process of learning. My wife is a teacher of sewing and textiles design as one facet of her multi-skilled talented life and I lecture at a university in Liverpool on occasion as part of the weaved web of things I do. The central point of our conversation was to do with how the process of learning, becoming good at something and creating was devalued and the end product was viewed as the sole purpose of doing something and therefore the process should be minimised.
My daughter has many things she loves. She is an avid climber, she loves to make music, she is fascinated by penguins and she is a fan of creative pursuits. One creative pursuit has often stood out and that is ceramics or pottery if you prefer. She has her own wheel and from the age of six has had some occasional lessons with professional potters. We have even been to Middleport pottery a couple of times to see where the BBC show the Pottery Throwdown is filmed (it is a lovely place to visit). Having met some highly skilled potters, the kind of people who trained for years, we have heard the story a couple of times that for the first 6 months or year of training you have to smash every pot you make. Imagine, after spending time attempting to craft a perfect pot, you have to smash each one you make. Wouldn’t that destroy your soul? No, I don’t believe it would. As there is a very defined purpose to why this is done. The secondary purpose is to preserve the quality of the pottery coming from the pottery house you are training with, but, the primary reason is to instil within the trainee a love of the process above the product.
There has been a story in the news over recent days about the number of people dying attempting to conquer the mighty mountain Everest. I noticed one article that quoted a Sherpa named Kami Rita Sherpa. He said that there are a number of factors that are contributing to the number of people dying and the overcrowding on Everest but the main factor is inexperience.
Kami believes it’s an increase in the number of less experienced climbers, that are making the problem worse. He blames some tour companies for underestimating the risks to novice climbers.
Now, this points to a huge problem that is happening in many pursuits. There is a bucket-list culture that we have allowed to become desirable. There are new articles every year of 101 things you need to do before you die and these lists all include things like:
- Climb Mt. Everest/Kilimanjaro
- Climb El Capitan
- Parachute Jump
- Learn an instrument
- Learn to sculpt
- ….
You get the idea. But one of the problems we see highlighted in the story from Kami Rita Sherpa is that people want to shortcut the process. It is a thing they want to tick off of their list and increasingly the tick is all that matters. Climbing Everest is hard, sculpting is hard we can not lifehack our way through everything and we certainly can’t download Kung-Fu training directly into our synapses.
What we need to do is remember that everything we do requires a process to learn it. Whether it is a small child learning their native language (no such thing, nobody is born able to speak a language), a teenager learning to drive or a middle-aged man learning to brew beer (I’m thinking about it) we need to understand there is a process involved and experience to be built up. As in the Everest example, one should train and climb smaller peaks over a number of years to gain the insights needed such as:
- Understanding the dangers of different routes and selecting the safest one
- The ability to read and anticipate weather conditions
- The ability to read the terrain
- Planning the correct equipment
- Taking the correct precautions and following the advice of local guides and safety teams
- Understanding the terminology
- Being skilled enough to use the equipment required
- ….
Joshua Medcalf wrote a fabulous book about this whole concept of learning to love the process, it is called Chop Wood, Carry Water. I advise everyone to read it. That way we can relearn that the process is often what makes something worthwhile not the number of things we tick off of our bucket-lists.
