Unlearning

I've played ping pong for many years. A thing you notice with anyone that's self-taught is that they tend to hit the ball flat. It works. If you work with a coach, they'll tell you the right way to hit the ball back is to loop. It takes longer for someone self-taught to learn to loop than for someone who picked up the paddle yesterday. Not because the beginner is better, but because they don't have many years of a very fast, very confident answer to "the ball is coming."Muscle memory isn't only in your muscles. Everyone these days is measuring how fast they learn new things. Nobody's measuring how fast they let go. Learning velocity is not the constraint these days. Unlearning definitely is. And what's worse is that the cost scales with how good you were in the first place. A skill you've honed isn't knowledge you can go edit. It's compiled. It fires before you decide anything, and under pressure you revert. The moment you most need the new thing is the moment you're least likely to…