Chopsticks
If you’ve ever tried to eat with chopsticks, you might remember that there isn’t really an eating-with-chopsticks learning curve. You can get pretty hungry as you drop food on yourself over and over and over again. Then, suddenly, one day you can eat with chopsticks! (If you didn’t lose your motivation and give up after a week.)
During our time studying in China my friend Sara* told me the reason she never used chopsticks was because she had given up trying years ago, never having seen any progress however often she picked them up.
Eventually our group got tired of her pulling out her fork at every meal. We held an intervention and promised her that if she would keep using chopsticks for two weeks, despite the complete lack of apparent progress, she would wake up one day and find herself able to do it.
Sara gave up on chopsticks for over a decade. 10 days after our talk she was telling people that anyone can learn to use chopsticks. You just have to keep trying and it will happen.
Why should you care about chopsticks?
Some things in life work the way we’d expect. We learn, practice, get a little better, practice more, get better, and we feel really good about ourselves. And some things in life are like chopsticks.
Whether you’re leaning a physical skill, studying a new subject or changing an old habit, sometimes a lot of work has to go on under the surface.
When it comes to chopsticks, you fail repeatedly until one day you can use them without thinking because your muscles have embodied the motions. You’ve made the switch from individual instructions to the hand – hold one stick between these two fingers, and that one between those two fingers, now move one, but not the other… to a single command – use chopsticks.
Sometimes when we are working hard at something and not seeing any progress it is a sign that we need to change what we’re doing.
But sometimes it just means that the progress is happening where we can’t see it.
So before you give up on your new sport, job, course or diet, try asking people who have already done the thing if you should be seeing steady progress, or if you need to hang in there regardless, because you are learning to eat with chopsticks.
Have you had a “chopsticks”? Share in the comments.
Check back next week in two weeks (oops, forgot about Hanukkah) for more depressing truths about life fun, easy, cheerful nutrition advice that might even be helpful to you. Or click here to sign up for the newsletter.
*Not her real name.
Good advice, thanks!
You’re very welcome. Glad you liked it!