Learning, the Hard Fun way
Understanding how having fun the hard way amounts to drastically different results
Kat’s fingers almost bled after the first two weeks of learning to play guitar. She intently wanted to be able to play the instrument but much like life in a pandemic, it was not going as per the plans. She could now play some notes from popular numbers that required the use of only a single string, which felt rewarding (read ‘fun’) but learning to play the six strings with ten fingers, rapidly changing pace as though you were born to do it all along, and learning to read a new script — music, altogether, can be daunting. For Kat, it was fun so far, but gradually ceasing to be so.
There comes a point when fun tends to become ‘Hard Fun’, well, if persisted upon long enough without giving up. On most occasions, what feels like ‘fun’ is actually a pattern that our brain recognises, allowing us to feel relaxed and enjoy the process of watching the activity unfold while we observe or partake in it.
Human brains love patterns; in fact, we are patterns. Throughout our day, we scan everything presented in front of us to bits to identify familiar patterns everywhere.
Coffee brewed just to our taste, PATTERN
Milk delivery at the same time, PATTERN
Hitting the bed at the same time, PATTERN
If one thing goes awry in the above — the coffee doesn't work, the coffee doesn't get made, or the coffee is needed at an odd hour (in that order) — we find ourselves grumbling!
As soon as a task gets complex to a level that is beyond our mental set of discernable patterns, there’s NOISE! This noise can frustrate and make us want to give up.
However, with deliberate practice, the patterns around start unfolding themselves to us, we become better at tracing them and seeing them reoccur. We experience something that the greatest of the educational thinkers call — HARD FUN.
FUN is distinct from HARD FUN. Fun is fuelled by exploration and fascination and shakes up our creative instincts. It pushes us towards an activity or as Nicole Lazzaro illustrates in her 4 Keys 2 FUN diagram - Fun evokes a sense of wonder, awe, curiosity, surprise and creativity.
On most occasions, fun plays a role in shaking us up, to remind what makes us feel alive and soon we are back to the grind of the usual. Persisting through it, however, ups the level to ‘Hard Fun’.
It is that state of intense flow when the task at hand is arduous and yet enjoyable. You face obstacles so engaging that you want to conquer them. Hard fun keeps us coming back for more leading to progression in learning and eventually mastery!
Hard fun makes people break boundaries, it makes them work for hours and hours and forget about a dimension named time.
I came across the term ‘Hard Fun’ while reading a work by the celebrated educational thinker- Seymour Papert:
“Way back in the mid-eighties a first grader gave me a nugget of language that helps. The Gardner Academy (an elementary school in an under-privileged neighborhood of San Jose, California) was one of the first schools to own enough computers for students to spend significant time with them every day. Their introduction, for all grades, was learning to program, in the computer language Logo, at an appropriate level. A teacher heard one child using these words to describe the computer work: “It’s fun. It’s hard. It’s Logo.” I have no doubt that this kid called the work fun because it was hard rather than in spite of being hard.”
In the context of learning and fun, Papert also talked about the importance of “low floors” and “high ceiling”. The ladder to the high ceilings of hard fun has its base at the low floors. Design the first step too high, nobody ever touches it; too low, it’s boring.
“For a technology to be effective, Papert said, it should provide easy ways for novices to get started (low floors) but also ways for them to work on increasingly sophisticated projects over time (high ceilings).”
Regardless of our mental competence, first step towards mastery of any skill is FUN. We begin by getting attracted to something, enough to want to try our hands on it.
Listening to “A step you can’t take back” by Kiera Nightly twists and turns my stomach enough to nudge me to learn guitar- EXPLORATION.
I hold a guitar, strum the strings randomly and feel good about it- FUN.
I learn to play some beginner tunes- Instant Gratification / Enjoying the ‘LOW FLOOR’.
Practice further and get stuck- OBSTACLES
Try harder- CHALLENGE
Manage to slowly play using all six strings- PERSISTENCE to reach the HIGH CEILING
Keep coming back for more ( even though it is taking forever to learn Guitar) - HARD FUN
Of course, the upper ceiling keeps getting higher forever, the important thing is to have fun on the way and keep learning with relentless persistence!
When FUN begins to get HARD, real learning happens.
After around 25 years of age, the brains stops forming new neural pathways naturally, and our habits, attitudes, biases are almost set in stone. Nothing changes if nothing changes. The brains needs an external reinforcement to establish a new skill and learn regularly to update the long-term memory which is responsible for expertise establishment.
Investing in hard fun does exactly that with deliberate practice. Slowly but surely, this indulgence can help us think and connect the dots across disciplines, give the creative confidence a boost and make us a better learner.
With all this hype around finding your Ikigai, all that matters is to move around, take up copious learning battles head on, keep that little convulated mass of neural networks on the top floor moving and you’ll be good.
In a series of articles to follow, I talk about why is creativity hard fun, and the impact of exposure on creativity. Stay tuned and keep having fun the hard way!
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