Edition #39 - Learn new things with beaming confidence

I recently came across a phenomenon called as the Dunning–Kruger effect:

It maps our confidence with respect to the knowledge we gain in a field.

The interesting bit here is the confidence we have at the beginning of learning something new.?Paradoxically we are the most confident with the least knowledge.

This graph stuck with me because I can relate my fitness journey to it so well.

I never did a pushup in my life before I got in high school, and the day I did it for the first time, it was a total disaster. Me and 4 other students were asked to do as many pushups as possible for the Physical Education practical. Not only did I fail to do more than 2 pushups, I sprained my leg doing the third one.

Years after this incident I took pushups as a challenge. I came across a?7-minute workout routine?which had 12 exercises, 30 seconds each with 10 seconds gap in between. With every one locked inside their homes due to COIVD-19, 7 minutes was just a drop in the ocean of time we had at hand.

Why did I call it a pushup challenge?

One of the 12 exercises was pushups. I challenged myself to gradually increase them from zero to 2 digits. It carried more weight when I told someone, “I did pushups for 30 seconds” as compared to, “I did 4 pushups”.

You won't believe what followed.

I was consistent with this regime for over 13 months and?lost 10kgs?in the process!

With the results so good, I was beaming with confidence. I suggested the 7-minute workout to any one and everyone starting their fitness journey. But there was one problem.?I didn’t want to learn anything new after I had achieved this.?The results after all were a testimonial to the fact that I knew enough.

I used to workout in my room alone. But one of the days I had a power cut in my hostel and I decided to workout in the corridor. A friend of mine—also a fitness enthusiast—saw me doing pushups. He told me that I was not doing them right. It felt like a setback, because I had been doing it that way for quite a while now.

But I took the feedback in a constructive way. Over the next few months as I opened myself to more feedback and learned new things about fitness, I realized my shallow knowledge in the subject.

In a nutshell, I realized fitness was not just about the 7-minute cardio that I did in my room, it was also about -?eating the right things, working out in the right way, lifting weights, and recovery through rest.

I felt a little overwhelmed with how much I didn’t know, but I kept myself on the learning curve.

I now have a fitness routine in place which incorporates almost everything I know about fitness. I’ve kept it flexible so that it evolves over time, but without compromising on any of the?4 key pillars of fitness - diet, strength, cardio, recovery.

But that initial confidence is really useful if you want to learn something new. I thought I would never be able to do pushups. But the paradoxical confidence at the beginning helped me cross my mental limitations. Although in the wrong way, I?did?do pushups almost every day for over a year.

Sometimes being ignorant is good, you can focus on a few things, essentially the most important ones.

Choose to focus on taking a lot of actions in the initial phase instead of focussing on learning. Imagine having to learn the right way to do pushups when you don’t have the strength to do even one. It’s a lot better to just do it the wrong way than to not do it at all. It will change something in you - your body, your identity, your will power. You can always correct your form and learn from your mistakes on the way.

Quote of the week

Writer Elbert Hubbard on mistakes:

The greatest mistake you can make in life is continually fearing that you'll make one.

Get 1% better ?

If you want to know about my fitness routine which I’m able to follow consistently with a job, let me know in the comments. I will get it to you in one of the future blogs.

Until next week, ?

Jainuine

Heyy there!

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