[pknomad]

I suppose I could be more charitable but I feel like title doesn't really match with the message of the blog. Otherwise I thoroughly enjoyed this feel-good story about persistence and micro-improvements. Most of us mortals aren't talented at everything and diligent practice is required for most of us to get better.

[bee_rider]

Yeah, somewhat relatedly… I think the real lesson (at least if you grew up near the coast) is that everything is hard for somebody. I can’t really think of a kayak as an easy-to-flip craft, but that doesn’t really matter for this person’s journey.

[Rendello]

It depends on the kayak too.

An extreme example, but: I used to watch this channel from a guy that built canoes and kayaks in both modern and traditional styles. He says in some videos that the traditional hunting kayaks are incredibly unstable and uncomfortable to use, because that instability granted them superior agility for hunting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=DtnUq5v7cyw

[cpursley]

Have you read The Starship and The Canoe? Interesting book to goes into a good bit of detail about hunting craft (made from animal skin). Book said that they practiced 10 different was to turn a flipped one back over.

[Rendello]

I haven't, but I've read "Birchbark Canoe" by David Gidmark. He's written some technical canoe-making books, but this one was the story about how he came to live in Northern Quebec amongst the Algonquin and learned how to make birch bark canoes from William Commanda, with whom he had a fairly turbulent relationship. I saw it in a big library one day and uncharacteristically actually managed to read the whole thing, it was very good!

[bee_rider]

Huh, neat. Unfortunately that site doesn’t seem to play videos correctly on my system. What do they use the agility for? Traditional hunting, so I imagine… a bow or something, maybe they need to turn quickly to help aim?

[_9ptr]

Ok, I'll bite. What did you do to make youtube not work?

[bee_rider]

No idea, iOS + Safari + Firefox Focus + the built-in Apple blockers. The video seemed to randomly freeze when not in full screen, but it would exit full screen when I tried to hop around in the video. I bet there’s an easy fix but I’m not a big video guy anyway.

[aspenmayer]

No who you were replying to, but trying to help.

Something about how they shared the link encoded a preference for the desktop version of YouTube, but since you’re on iOS, I have stripped all of that off their link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtnUq5v7cyw

[tomjakubowski]

Same principle as aerodynamically unstable fighter jets?

[Rendello]

But without the benefit of a computer to make hundreds of micro-adjustments per second!

[ge96]

That was pretty cool surfing that wave on the kayak ha at 1:27

[stronglikedan]

Sit ins are definitely easy to flip, but sit on tops aren't. Especially thin ones. They probably went for the thin, fast one instead of the wide, slow one while being naive to the implications.

[skeeter2020]

kayaks are muchj tipier than canoes but shouldn't be flipping if you're just sitting in them, unless these are highly specialized racing kayaks, which are tougher to navigate.

[bee_rider]

Interesting! I never felt like I was going to flip a sit-in kayak, but I don’t even remember the first time I went in one really, it is a fuzzy early childhood memory.

Canoes, I’ve been in canoes that are destined to flip whether I want them to or not (although they were overloaded, or may have had some traitors aboard).

[eszed]

That's funny, because I grew up canoeing and have never on my own flipped one - other people in the boat doing dumb stuff, of course, or trying something silly in white water (maybe that counts as "on my own"?), sure - but I feel totally stable and comfortable in a canoe. Kayaks, though? Man, they're trying bite me! I've never felt like even the most stable beginner-friendly of kayaks wasn't trying to throw me off it.

I think the difference is stroke technique? I'm sure I'm instinctively trying to paddle a kayak like I would a canoe, and they don't like that. If I had more opportunity I'd get someone to teach me proper kayak stroke shapes, and then they'd probably feel more friendly.

[atoav]

The thing is a lot of what looks like a natural talent from the outside is also just learning on the inside. I won my provinces swimming competition without ever having swum in a competition before against swimmers who were all in a club. Reason: I grew up near a lake and was there every day during my whole childhood.

The thing is that people with "talent" are often just people who did what you're trying to do for fun their whole lifes. So talent then is just code for: "had a natural preference for doing it and both the means and time to do it".

[silvestrov]

I think the real message is:

to be okay with repeatedly looking dumb in public

It is the same with going to the gym for the first time.

[vunderba]

Reminds me of when you introduce somebody to PIU/DDR for the first time. Everyone gets self-conscious for a few minutes until they realize that nobody cares.

[IceDane]

Yeah, maybe the original message sort of got lost along the way. I think there is still some truth in the post when applied to the title.

I think one of the most important things I ever learned is that hard things take time. There is an obvious relationship between the effort required and the size of the undertaking, but also the worthiness of the effort. In other words: rarely, if ever, can you build great things in a short amount of time or with little effort.

And that's where this post makes sense: to build something great or to solve something hard, you have to show up every day and chip away at the problem, piece by piece. The progress will be slow and nearly invisible to you as you experience it, and is usually only clear in hindsight after a year or two (or more), when you can look back and see all that's changed -- hopefully for the better -- since you started.

[mrec]

I think it's more than just "hard things take time". The key sentence for me is this one:

> Kayaking taught me to be okay with repeatedly looking dumb in public.

I had the same thing when I first started running, in my early 50s. I'm sure I looked absolutely ridiculous. (I'm fairly sure I still do, I just stopped caring.) When I first started I would go out around 6am, partly because it was cooler but mostly so I wouldn't be seen. I've chatted to other runners who were the same, even keeping it secret from their family.

Getting over that has been a very positive change, and a generally-applicable one. I've just started blogging publicly, which would historically have triggered the same kind of looking-like-an-idiot phobias.

There was a post (maybe saw it here, maybe on Reddit) about sucking in public being a kind of moat for all sorts of interesting things. Crossing it gets you to places you otherwise couldn't go.

[scair]

https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/the-moat-of-low-status-68...

[mrec]

Yes, that was the one, thanks.

[ecocentrik]

People can be easily overwhelmed by simple challenges. At some point everyone experiences this and we learn to overcome bigger challenges through life.

Another point that might apply is that OP probably has a high center of gravity which can make kayaking really challenging. They should probably clarify this.

[skeeter2020]

It does feel a little more about psychological courage and grit than doing hard things.