Delphic Maxim 57: Use your skill
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day
57. Use your skill
Several months ago — January, in fact — I started this project to write about each of the Delphic Maxims, ever weekday morning, for fifteen minutes a day. There were a bunch of reasons I chose to do this: I’ve been reading a lot of Ancient Greek literature and history lately, I’ll be visiting the Oracle at Delphi in two month’s time, I find Jordan Peterson’s approach to life advice boring and predictable and wanted to write something else for young men to obsess about.
But most importantly, I started this project to get back in the habit of writing. I’ve been working on a PhD for some time now. People sometimes think that doing a PhD requires you to be really smart — it doesn’t. A lot of my friends are much, much smarter than me. What a PhD requires is persistence (especially if you’re doing it part time, as I am). There are vast tracts of time that go by where I don’t write anything, where I might read a bunch of material or think about social theory, and then see how I can take those ideas for a walk in fiction or the ‘real world’. After a while, the amount of time that goes by without writing builds up — and so does the insane guilt.
Writing, like an skill, is something that gets better with practice. Use it or lose it is the saying. So for me, this exercise — writing each morning — was about getting myself in the habit of writing again. It’s about being able to explain an idea clearly and quickly (or at least attempt to). It’s also about practicing playing with metaphors, finding my own writerly voice, and bedding down and reinforcing my knowledge of the things that I read.
Some days, like today, I don’t reference other authors or the sources of ideas. I just ramble off things that come into my mind. Other days, I draw heavily on the things that I’ve been reading — but those days require a bit more thought and preparation. In a way, that’s the thing I find most interesting about teaching students how to write:
Writing random opinions and making stuff up out of your head is much faster and easier than working with ideas that already exist.
Critical thinking is also a skill, and working with existing literature and ideas demands that you think critically. Creative writing — as opposed to opinionated drivel — is very similar. To be really creative, you’re often riffing on other things that you’ve read. I know my own instinct for creativity and creative writing has exploded since I started reading a whole bunch of literature for a Great Books course I created with my friends.
Isn’t that interesting! Using your skills improves and enhances your skills — the more you read, the better you write, the better you think, the better you imagine. The more you write, the better you argue, the better you create, the better you take in and analyse the things you read. Practice not only makes perfect (it might not even do that, because there’s always room to improve), but it also improves and perfects things that you aren’t practicing at the same time.
Humans are creatures of practice. If we aren’t engaging in practices, we aren’t really doing very much at all. That’s probably why it feel so rewarding to use the skills that we have. The sense of achievement that we get when we do something we’re skilled at is a positive feedback loop — our brains improve and expand, and we feel good.
So the lesson from this maxim is not only to use your skill, but to use it regularly, so that it — and you — improve each day. I’m biases too, but I think taking the time to write each morning is something we can all benefit from. Reflection and writing are crucial in developing our critical minds. Putting something together for the consumption of others requires careful thought and conscious arguing (even if — like these blogs — very few people actually read it)!
So your turn. Do what you’re good at — use your skill. And maybe have a crack at writing each day. Maybe even start with a comment below, expand your own thoughts, respond, argue, be critical. It feels good.
