buy and hold
No, actually, you know the most valuable life skill I've learned from fandom? I talk a lot about this, about how fandom has helped me in academia and taught me about sex and got me to figure out the right answer to a trivia question about set theory one time and a whole bunch of other stuff. But I just realized something else, and I think it might be more important than almost any of that.
Fandom has taught me to trust myself to get better at things.
I don't like being bad at things. I mean, no one does, but for me competence is the main factor that defines my self-worth. If I feel incompetent, I feel like shit; if I feel competent, I'm happy. So when I was a kid, if I tried something new and I wasn't good at it, I often quit. I was a smart kid, and there weren't a whole lot of things I didn't feel good at right off the bat, but sports? Programming? I sucked, and I wasn't willing to push through the learning curve, so I gave up.
Watching hockey was a new experience for me, because I had no basis for it. Pretty much all the academic classes I've ever taken built off knowledge I already had, and most other topics I can remember learning about in other contexts were the same way. But I had no clue about sports. I'd seen sports games in a very shallow sense, but I'd never made much of an effort to process what I was seeing. I've never even spent much time playing relevant video games. It was completely new to me, and it was confusing as hell at first. Other people were talking about the defensive strategy and plays they could see, and I couldn't even keep track of where the puck was, much less process anything else happening on the ice. But I watched a bajillion games, and trusted that I would get the hang of it.
I think that's because of the many times I've experienced entering a new fandom. I tend to find new fandoms through the fic, not the canon, which means I have no idea what's going on at first. So I've had a lot of practice figuring out a whole new thing without context. And that's led to trying new forms of fannish creation, too. Vidding has been an awesome learning curve, in that every vid I make fixes at least one thing I thought was wrong with the last one, but I inevitably notice something new I don't like in the new one after it's done, which gives me the opportunity to improve from project to project without triggering my "oh god I suck at this" reaction. Also, fandom is great about positive feedback, which is really helpful when I'm feeling shaky about a new thing.
I've been reading a lot about personal finance lately. Yesterday I spent four hours browsing guides for beginning investors. The stock market is absolutely fascinating to me, all of a sudden. (Random, I know. It took me kind of off-guard.) And it has that same feel, like it's all way too much and I'll never really understand this stuff, because this is not something I've ever paid the slightest attention to in the past. But I know now that it's not too much. There's a learning curve, and once I get past it, my grasp of the subject will be perfectly fine. And I think fandom made me confident of that.
Also, on the topic of finance as fandom: exchange-traded funds are totally meta. STOCKCEPTION.
This entry was originally posted at http://jedusaur.dreamwidth.org/96113.html.
Fandom has taught me to trust myself to get better at things.
I don't like being bad at things. I mean, no one does, but for me competence is the main factor that defines my self-worth. If I feel incompetent, I feel like shit; if I feel competent, I'm happy. So when I was a kid, if I tried something new and I wasn't good at it, I often quit. I was a smart kid, and there weren't a whole lot of things I didn't feel good at right off the bat, but sports? Programming? I sucked, and I wasn't willing to push through the learning curve, so I gave up.
Watching hockey was a new experience for me, because I had no basis for it. Pretty much all the academic classes I've ever taken built off knowledge I already had, and most other topics I can remember learning about in other contexts were the same way. But I had no clue about sports. I'd seen sports games in a very shallow sense, but I'd never made much of an effort to process what I was seeing. I've never even spent much time playing relevant video games. It was completely new to me, and it was confusing as hell at first. Other people were talking about the defensive strategy and plays they could see, and I couldn't even keep track of where the puck was, much less process anything else happening on the ice. But I watched a bajillion games, and trusted that I would get the hang of it.
I think that's because of the many times I've experienced entering a new fandom. I tend to find new fandoms through the fic, not the canon, which means I have no idea what's going on at first. So I've had a lot of practice figuring out a whole new thing without context. And that's led to trying new forms of fannish creation, too. Vidding has been an awesome learning curve, in that every vid I make fixes at least one thing I thought was wrong with the last one, but I inevitably notice something new I don't like in the new one after it's done, which gives me the opportunity to improve from project to project without triggering my "oh god I suck at this" reaction. Also, fandom is great about positive feedback, which is really helpful when I'm feeling shaky about a new thing.
I've been reading a lot about personal finance lately. Yesterday I spent four hours browsing guides for beginning investors. The stock market is absolutely fascinating to me, all of a sudden. (Random, I know. It took me kind of off-guard.) And it has that same feel, like it's all way too much and I'll never really understand this stuff, because this is not something I've ever paid the slightest attention to in the past. But I know now that it's not too much. There's a learning curve, and once I get past it, my grasp of the subject will be perfectly fine. And I think fandom made me confident of that.
Also, on the topic of finance as fandom: exchange-traded funds are totally meta. STOCKCEPTION.
This entry was originally posted at http://jedusaur.dreamwidth.org/96113.html.