Last month we did a short holiday in Udupi, to visit my wife’s aunt and grandmother who live there now. On the penultimate day of the holiday (way too late, with the benefit of hindsight), we went to Kadal Surf School to learn to surf.

Unfortunately we could do only one session there but it was easily the best part of the trip. It was a whole load of fun getting on to the board and then riding the waves.

For the first two rounds, the coach said we could ride the waves prone (rather, in a sort of “cobra position”). But every successive round after that we were supposed to jump up on to our feet on the board.

Our daughter managed to stand once, though she didn’t remain standing for too long. My wife and I just kept falling off. In fact, unfailingly, I alternately fell forwards and backwards, shifting my hips too far back of forward on each try. Nevertheless, the whole experience was a lot of fun.

Some time in life (hopefully not too much later) I want to do a full 5-7 day course and really learn to surf. Oh, and in the “trial class”, we learnt that you don’t need to really know to swim to surf - you are always tied to the surfboard and so that will make you float in the sea.

And speaking of swimming - I was thinking during the class about how my learning pattern with respect to both swimming and surfing are very similar (hopefully they’re not, since I hope to learn to actually learn to surf well). Basically you can think of both consisting of an “easy first step” and a “harder second step”. And whenever the learning curve is shaped this way, I find that I do the first step so easily that I get excited, and I never get to mastering the second step.

Like I remember when I learnt to swim for the first time in 2002 - I got really excited about gliding in the pool. It was just a whole lot of fun. And then from there to beating legs was still okay. And then when you had to get to also pulling your arms and breathing on the side it was suddenly a whole new level of complexity - one that I have failed to master despite trying to take swimming coaching at least 2-3 times hence. Maybe the next time I need to find a personal trainer to teach me to swim!

With surfing again, getting on the board and being in a cobra position as you got carried on the waves was a whole load of fun. But I found (in my first trial class) the process of jumping up (the coach would give the command) way too difficult. I’m hoping that when I go to learn it properly I’ll learn it well, and it won’t go the way of swimming!

And this learning pattern holds elsewhere as well. As you might know, earlier this year I went for a Vipassana course, which I exited halfway through. Again, there, the first step (anapana - observing your breath) was easy and enjoyable - I daydreamed a fair bit and got a lot of insights about my life. And then when they actually taught us vipassana, observing the sensation through the body (and not shifting in posture), suddenly the level had gone up so much that I started finding problems with the process and quickly made an exit.

It is similar with olympic lifts - deadlifts and front squats are easy enough, but just the amount of complexity required to complete a rep of a clean has meant that I have just failed to progress to that. And while I’ve managed to successfully learnt to snatch, it’s been at the cost of a shoulder injury that remained so bad for so long (thanks to behind the neck pressing I think) that I gave up on snatch altogether!

On the other hand, I’ve found my learning style with academic / work stuff to be very very different to all of this. With more technical stuff, I find myself having a much slower ramp up right in the beginning, and then at some point having an inflexion after which I learn rather well. Concepts in maths and physics and accounting and statistics and coding and LLMs - all of them follow this pattern. I learn rather slowly for a while (to the point of almost giving up) and then suddenly starting to “get it” after which everything falls into place and my learning accelerates.

In that sense, when something is very hard to learn initially, as long as I stick with it, I end up learning it rather well. Stuff where the first step is easy, I end up not taking the second big step at all (maybe I get too excited after the first step?).

What have you noticed about your learning styles? Do you learn better when the first step is easier or harder? What kinds of patterns have you noticed?