How I Think Differently When There's No One Else
I feel like that thing is staring at me. Or maybe it’s actually glaring at me. I know it’s been broken for months, but I’m not exactly sure what’s wrong or how to fix it!
It’s scary starting a project that I don’t know how to do even if I feel like I can figure it out. How long is it gonna take? How big of a mess is there gonna be? How much will it cost?
The water feature in our backyard stopped featuring water at the end of last fall. I never would have paid for something like this; it was here when we moved in. We grew to love it. It makes one corner of our yard feel a bit like a lush jungle and the water falling adds some natural sounds to mask the sounds of the city.
It was almost winter when it broke, so I didn’t fix it. But now that it's spring, I want it back.
There’s a different feeling when I do a project with others versus alone. With others, I try to be respectful of their time, I feel embarrassed when I make a mistake, and when we’re stuck I hope the other person comes up with the solution. That possibility of someone else solving the problem seems to keep my brain from entering the deep thought required to solve it myself.
When I’m alone, I want to avoid mistakes, but with no one else to see them happen, I don’t care nearly as much when they do.
The mistakes I usually make almost feel inevitable or even necessary so when they happen I don’t beat myself up, I just think, “Well, I didn’t know. Now I do. I hope I remember next time.”
And the fact that I’m the only one that can solve it is some kind of permission for my brain to think deeper, longer, and more creatively. Or maybe I’m stuck and I need to take a break.
Sometimes when I have an insight I want to understand it well enough to share with my kids. Group projects are valuable for teaching how to work well with others and learning how to deal with bullshit. Individual projects are opportunities for you to push yourself to a place you haven’t been and didn’t know you could go.
I want to try out a new idea. If the insights from my post could be helpful to my kids, I want to try to sum up the main points as briefly as possible to help me better teach it to them. Here’s my first one.
Summary for my kids:
When doing a project with someone who knows more than I do, I realized that I lean on them for final decisions or critical moments and that can make sense to get something finished. But when I’m alone I think much harder. It feels like a skill to get to that extra deep level of thinking. Learn what that feels like by doing projects alone and then you will be able to apply it to projects with others too.
