It's Not Bragging If It's True by Zaila Avant-garde

Author:Zaila Avant-garde [Avant-garde, Zaila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2023-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

Show Up

To me, showing up means you are doing something with a very strong level of effort consistently. Like, every day. And you can’t do that without preparation and conditioning. Preparation is whatever you do to get ready for something, which probably includes lots of practice. Practice looks very different depending on what you’re trying to get good at. If you want to do great on a math test, your practice might be doing math problems. If you’re trying to become great at drawing, you might be practicing lines and shapes, or shading. But what some people count as practice, I would barely call a warm-up. If that sounds scary, that’s okay. You don’t have to jump into practicing something for seven hours every day just because you heard I do that. You’re not competing with me, remember? The only thing you have to do is a little more than you’re used to. If you want to show up for, say, multiplication facts, and yesterday you studied them for zero minutes, today try practicing them for five minutes. Then move to ten minutes. Then fifteen. Depending on what your goal is, you may never have to get close to working on it for seven hours at a time. That’s not how it was for me, though, at least not when it came to spelling.

I wanted to be great at spelling, so I practiced the words that appear in the Scripps National Spelling Bee most frequently. There are lots of them, and every day I did 13,000 of them. If I only wanted to be good, I could have just leaned on the words I already knew. I knew a lot! In fact, before I ever decided to be a speller, my father kind of tested me on it. He was watching the Scripps National Spelling Bee and got curious about how I would have done, so he quizzed me about all the words in the final round. He was doing it for fun, and I got nearly every single one right. That was good. Realizing I was already kind of good at spelling made me curious to know if I could be great. So I practiced. When I say practice, I mean repeating something so many times that it basically becomes a part of you. Like, maybe you make a mistake, but that mistake would be one out of a hundred times, not one out of ten. So, to get there, I used a program called SpellPundit, and I practiced spelling words for seven hours a day. Over time, I worked my way up to spelling 13,000 words all in one day.

Conditioning is not just the skill you’re practicing; it’s how long your mind and body will let you do it well. When I first started spelling, I would get pretty tired. Over time, I gradually built up stamina. By practicing for seven hours, I was conditioning my brain to focus on spelling for almost an entire day, which, coincidentally, is exactly what you have to do when you’re at a regional or national spelling bee.

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