Conscious vs. Unconscious Competence

So I've had some interesting things happen to me recently. Overall, I feel like my game has been progressing, to the point where I sometimes do things right. I'm still not getting laid regularly, but I am getting fairly solid numbers and the occasional makeout. I'm starting to see the pull opportunities, even if I'm not always taking them.

The strange thing is that it's a lot of work. I can see what I need to do, but it requires a large amount of effort. It's kind of like when you learn to drive stick. At first, you stall the car out no matter what you do. Then, after a while, you get to the point where you can do it, but it takes a lot of practice. If you keep doing it, you eventually get to where you just sort of change gears and operate the clutch pedal without thinking. But it takes a while to truly get there. There are actually a lot of steps. Here are some:

- Stall the car when you try to change into first gear
- Can change into first gear, but you constantly smell the clutch
- Can change the gears, but you stall out all the time. You probably can't start the car in second.
- Can change the gears, and drive the car, but you're probably spending way too much time paying attention to the clutch and shifter.
- Can change the gears, but you're really jerky. You also spend a lot of effort paying attention to your shifting.
- Can change the gears, and you're starting to get reasonably smooth. You have to pay attention to what you're doing.
- Can change the gears, and don't make a total fool of yourself. Sometimes you stall out, but not that often.
- Getting reasonably decent - you stall maybe once a week. You have to look at the RPMs to figure out when to shift.
- Getting to the point where you can pay attention to other things while you are driving. You eat drive-thru McDonalds while driving stick.
- You can't remember the last time that you stalled. It might have been last month when you were backing into a parking space.
- You're driving stick, and someone asks you whether you're driving stick (because the shifting is so smooth).
- You don't even think about shifting any more. It just sort of happens. You sort of know when to switch gears, based on the sound that the engine makes.

As you can see, there are many steps. None is a particularly large jump over the other. But, over time, you go from unconscious incompetence (you have never tried to drive stick) to conscious competence (where it isn't any harder to drive stick than automatic). The longest part of the learning period actually involves transition from the point where you can drive reasonably well but have to pay a lot of attention to the point where it just sort of happens.

Pickup is the same way. You need to figure out how to get to the point where you can do all of the things that you should be doing without thinking about them. And sometimes it isn't fun - you want to slide back into doing the things that don't require much conscious effort. But if you do that, you won't improve. More on that later, including my bubble theory.