A couple of months ago, I was writing the typical list of to-do’s before I die and #34 happened to be the dare-deviling jump off a waterfall stunt. But there was an issue with that goal. I couldn’t swim. Due to childhood traumatic experiences in community pools, I never learned how to swim. My parents refused to put me in the hands of mediocre instructors that could potentially cause me to drown or swallow gallons of chlorine. Ultimately, was stuck living the rest of my teenage and college years not being able to enjoy the deep end of pools.

So I decided to take lessons just to simply learn how to tread water. The instructor taught me to relax, breathe and kick like a bicycle. Five lessons in and all I learned was how to sink and nearly drown myself. Frustrated but determined, I decided to use the power of the interweb and search on YouTube for treading lessons. I found this video and all I needed to learn was the Egg Beater Technique! Yes, the Eggbeater Kick is mainly used in treading water for water polo and requires the legs to move in opposite directions. The next lesson, I jumped in the water, kicked my legs like a powerful egg beater and lo and behold I was treading water with little effort. Simple. Right? We live in a culture of instant satisfactions, instand downloads and uploads, super-immediate gratification, and this makes learning “hard things” very tough.

Making learning simple is thus a key goal to be realized. This idea of learning and simplicity made me think about a recent book I read by the infamous simplicity guru John Maeda, called The Laws of Simplicity which implies that one must learn to tolerate difficulty, ambiguity or complexity. But learning by my swimming teacher’s verbal instructions rather than actual visible demonstration, created this unknown mental model of how my legs were supposed to move. Furthermore, there was a level of difficulty in terms of the way one can learn the motion of one’s legs when they tread water because of the constraint of not being able to see what’s going on underneath the water.

The treading tutorial on YouTube had underwater cameras that shot the person’s egg beater movements at different angles, providing me a mental image of how I should move myself. Even if I was shown a simple infographic like the one I drew above, I would have gotten a better sense of how these legs are supposed to work underwater. Discovery often arrives because of an ignorance of what’s known, and an unintentional defiance of the ways things should be done. Ultimately, taking the time to learn the best way to tread water eventually leads to making it a simple task.

Next goal? Freestyle swimming baby. I’m going to take this to the triathlons. Bring it.