by Manidoo | Last Updated: September 13, 2022Requirements
Items: 3 Juggling Balls
Quest Log: Learning to Juggle
Juggling is one of those party trick skills that became a renewed interest since watching Mike Boyd do his video on learning it. Seeing him do it over the course of 4 hours made it seem like this seemingly difficult move all the less intimidating.
So back in November 2020, I decided to commit to learning to juggle once and for all. Over the course of 2 sessions a day, 30 minutes per session, I would dedicate myself to learning juggling. To be specific, I will try to learn how to juggle where my hand makes contact with a juggling ball 21 times in a row
Admittedly, this journey was a huge roller coaster. There would be plenty of times I feel like I made some excellent progress, and times when I felt like I made little progress at all. It got admittedly frustrating when I hit Mike Boyd’s 4-hour marker in practice and was still heavily struggling with getting this down. It was even more discouraging looking for other people’s experiences learning to juggle and hearing people get it down in under an hour. Although, it was a bit of a relief in hearing some people took months to get the skill down.
I immediately decided to stop thinking about how fast I should be trying to learn the skill, and just learn the skill. The time is irrelevant, it’s just a gauge. Having this mindset, I decided to go back to square one and re-learn how to juggle.
The first was finding a good tutorial video that worked for me. When you search “How to Juggle” on Youtube videos, you get a lot of videos with millions of views. However, whether they are good tutorial videos is largely subject to debate. When I search deeply into juggling discussion groups, I learned the most highly recommended tutorial video out there is not even in the top 10 most viewed videos out there.
Bob and Trish’s Juggling Tutorial ended up being the game changer I needed to learn how to juggle. It was very neatly broken down and drilled into phases to be mindful of when learning the new skill. I followed this video like I was a complete noob in learning this skill(Which admittedly I still was), following everything to a tee. In just a couple of hours later of practice, I managed to reach my goal of learning to juggle.
My total time of learning to practice was roughly 6 hours and 38 minutes. Not the quickest time to pick up this skill, but I’m still pretty dang proud of it. I felt like this Quest made me re-think a lot on how I need to approach learning future skill goals. I also now have a completely new skill under my belt that I have often used while telling a cheesy joke or two.
Lessons Learned
- The most viewed tutorial doesn’t necessarily mean the best tutorial. Look into the community of whatever you’re learning and find guide recommendations there
- Don’t get caught up in comparing your speed of learning to others. It can easily distract you away from focusing on your learning.
- If you find you’re achieving very little progress, try a new approach. For me, after hours of no progress, I reverted back to learning from zero. This really helped me drill much-needed basics that previously were tripping me up.
Rewards
XP Earned: 20 XP