If you want to get better at something – writing screenplays, gardening, making omelets, playing Tetris, organizing closets — find a way to do that thing with an expert, even if it’s just for an afternoon.

They’ll give you pointers, of course, but the real benefit is in how an expert can help you see the activity from a completely different viewpoint.

I got a lot better at rock climbing in 2022. That’s mainly because I did a lot of it. If I were to graph my progress, however, it wouldn’t be a straight line. It would rise slowly until the beginning of October, then angle up like a mountain over the last few months.

That’s because on October 2 I attended a climbing festival, and climbed with climbers way beyond my ability. Watching these people  was a revelation. They were slow, calm, and rested a lot. They moved more like sloths than monkeys.

Most importantly, they clearly saw the rock itself differently than I did. Whereas I saw it as a dangerous, prickly thing you’re fighting with and trying to conquer, they seemed to see it as a partner they can work with –- an eccentric but sturdy ladder that gets them to the top.

This was a complete figure-ground reversal for me. The rock helps you climb it! My climbing got better immediately, not because of any explicit advice I received, but because I had caught a glimpse of the activity from outside my normal way of seeing. My insight didn’t increase my existing climbing ability, so much as it changed my view of what climbing even is.

Climbing metaphors aside, this kind of improvement is what you could call “vertical growth.”

You can slowly –- horizontally — get better at something just by doing a lot of it. The problem is that the “it” that you’re doing can only be that thing as you’ve always understood it. If there are oversights and misunderstandings in the way you see the thing, you’re practicing them too.

If you habitually see playing guitar as a mad scramble to finger the right notes in time, you may only get better at madly scrambling. You could live and die never realizing that your favorite guitarists are not experts at what you’re doing; they’ve learned, or perhaps have always understood, the necessity of keeping your hands as relaxed as possible while you fret the notes.

Horizontal growth exhausts itself eventually. You reach a point where can’t do the thing any better or faster in the limited way you see that thing. You get stuck, and stay stuck until you stumble across another way of seeing.

Getting Unstuck

Watching an expert do their thing is a pretty helpful way to get unstuck at that thing, because you might catch a glimpse of how that person is seeing the thing differently than you.

But what if you’re stuck in less obvious way? How do you find an expert in “Feeling better about our species” or “Realizing my life purpose” or “Figuring out what’s wrong with me these days?”

How do you get unstuck when you don’t even know how you might be stuck? What if you’re stuck in some way you never even thought of as stuck? How would you know?

One strategy for addressing less obvious forms of stuckness, which humans have been doing forever, is to regularly do things that force you out of your habitual perspectives.

There’s a reason so many cultures have made rituals and rites of passage out of solo wilderness treks, hallucinogenic plant ceremonies, strenuous physical ordeals, and long periods of silent contemplation. These experiences put your mind in a very different place than usual, in order to induce insights about life, yourself, and the world that you’re unlikely to have otherwise.

The Stoics did this with a host of thought exercises. One was to pretend you’re looking down at this moment from high above, upon your little self, fretting in your little apartment, surrounded by the expanse of your city and the fields beyond, as a way of putting your worries into perspective. They also suggested imagining, as vividly as possible, losing your hands, your eyeballs, or your friends, or your freedom, to help you recognize the full value of those things while you still have them.

Humans have invented all sorts of practices like this, and their purpose is simply to put your mind somewhere outside of your normal, habitual ways of seeing, and discover what you come back with.

Nobody knows quite what insights and paradigm shifts will be produced by doing these practices, which is exactly why you do them.

Trying On New Ways of Seeing

Much of Raptitude has been a recounting of my own homemade perspective-inducing practices. I have dozens of them: viewing this moment as though it’s the first moment of your life; picturing the room you’re in as though you’re not in it; appreciating a nearby friend as though they’re gone from your life and you’re just remembering them.

I started doing these kinds of practices spontaneously –- unaware this was something many other humans have stumbled across — in my early twenties, which was the first time I really felt stuck.

Since then they’ve enriched my life tremendously. They keep me grateful and optimistic, and make ordinary days feel rich and meaningful. They help me achieve a measure of perspective on my problems and the world’s problems. They’re the reason Raptitude exists, and has the name that it does.

Even though I do these practices all the time, I’ve written about most of them only once in Raptitude’s thirteen years, and usually without proper instructions on how to do them.

So I’m trying a new idea. In January, once the holiday madness is behind us, I’m going to run a mini-course on how to use some of these “ways of seeing” in your own life.

We’ll do seven classic Raptitude practices over two weeks, in the context of everyday life, and see what shakes out –- what unsticks.  As we experiment, we will (optionally) share our experiences on the discussion board.

It’s kind of like a “field trip” for curious Raptitude readers. Instead of just reading about my weird perspectival exercises and then forgetting them, you’re going to get to try them in real life –- “in the field” so to speak.

In fact, I’m calling it Raptitude Field Trip.

UPDATE: Raptitude Field Trip is back for a second session, beginning May 8, 2023. Registration is open now.

[Sign up] | [Learn more] (Currently closed but there will be future Field Trips)

Three things to know about the Field Trip:

This is an easy, low-investment experiment. It’s a mini-course –- there’s a short 15-20 minute lesson every other day for two weeks. It probably won’t achieve the same thing as a peyote ceremony or an Australian walkabout or anything like that. The point is to pursue generate moments of insight — which is Raptitude’s overall goal — to reveal new ways of seeing certain aspects of your life, the people around you, and the world.

This begins May 8th, 2023. The course lessons will be unlocked over a three-week period, starting on the 8th. Participants will have permanent access to them, so you can do them later if you like.

[Sign up / more info]

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Photos by Tommy Lisbin, Zolan Tasi, Christopher Burns, Phil Hearing, Pauline Leroy, Henan Kamikoga