The hardest thing for debaters to ever do
All of you are here because of one central desire: you want to get better at debating. As such, your focus falls squarely on one thing: your speeches. But your speeches are just one part of what it means to debate – they’re just the end result, and while right now to you that’s the most important, I propose an alternative view: the end result is getting in your way.
Our entirely natural obsession with giving speeches that sound good – to impress ourselves, to impress those around us, and to impress people on the other side of the planet whom we’ve never met – is, above all else, what holds us back. It stresses us out, and puts us into a state of paralysis and anxiety. It pushes us to focus on nothing but practice, on training, on exercises, and leaves us drained. And worst of all, it makes us fear doing precisely the things for which we’re learning these skills.
If I had a dollar for every student who declared “I can’t prove that,” hosting this website would not burn a hole through my wallet. It’s such a common statement, but what it really means is “I can’t prove that right now, so what reason do I have to try?” Or, more poignantly, “to try to prove that would be a waste of my time.” And for this, I blame traditional schooling. School makes us terrified of failure, and declares success as the only useful result. I think differently.
Failure is a beginner’s job.
While as children we’re taught to run from failure – and even to actively avoid something that has a low chance of success – failure is not only okay or good, it is also a necessary, integral part of the learning process. Success tells us where we are in our development and what we’ve achieved so far, but only failure points ahead and reveals what paths lay ahead of us to grow even better than we are today. Thus, failure shows us where we have yet to go, and what we have yet to become.
The mistake we all make is that we take our failures personally. We come to interpret a bad speech as reflecting upon ourselves – if we give a bad speech, we ourselves must be bad. If we are unable to succeed at debating, then it must mean we are ourselves less valuable. That we should be ashamed. But, really, ashamed of what? Ashamed of being a beginner? Nonsense!
Everyone starts as a beginner. Some people are only beginners for a short period, others will be a beginner for many years. Or perhaps you are like me – eternally a beginner in some regard, always with something new to learn.
How we approach learning, our frame of mind as we do so, the kinds of exercises we do, and the people we choose to follow – these are all the factors that influence how we learn and progress, and at what rate we improve. But throw that all aside, because what’s important is one simple fact: Being a beginner is not a bad thing.
If anything, being a beginner is a position of freedom. After all, what on Earth does anyone expect from a beginner? You’re growing on your own time, at your own pace, and no one – especially not yourself – has any right to apply any expectations to that. Unfortunately, we are most often our own bullies in this regard, the ones leveraging those undue and unfair expectations, crushing ourselves before we’ve even truly begun.
“Ready”
Some of you love to give speeches on your own. You’ll sit and practice PMs all day. But the vast majority of you don’t. You want to debate, you love the idea of giving good speeches, and perhaps you can imagine yourself one day debating like the top debaters you admire – but right now, if invited to do so, you would likely give a simple answer: I’m not ready.
Ask yourself a simple question: what are you not ready for? Not ready to… give debate speeches well? What’s wrong with giving speeches badly? What’s wrong with playing around, experimenting for the hell of it? Does every speech you produce have to be amazing? If that’s the case, I’ve got bad news for you – because every top debater you admire sits atop a mountain of awful, embarrassing garbage speeches they have given over the years. So please — use these lessons to create and overcome fears of those awful, embarrassing, garbage speeches that you are so afraid of.
The 50% Rule
Finally, that brings us to why this is all relevant for you. Everyone following this course is expected to abide by what I call the 50% rule, without exception.
The 50% rule is simple. All the time you spend debating must be divided into two equal portions.
- One half will include everyone you do with the purpose of improving your skills. Coursework, exercises, watching youtube seminars, etc.
- The other half is reserved only for debating for the sake of debating. In other words, play. Experiment, and just throw yourself at motions and give yourself the freedom to just try, even though the result will likely turn out badly. Attend charity comps with your best friend and run meme cases, etc.
But Why?
There are a number of reasons why the 50% rule is extremely beneficial, despite how clearly frustrating and difficult it can be to follow:
It’ll help develop skills that do need to be developed at some point, and doing it now will help you avoid some stinging disappointment later on.
To put it simply, it becomes a lot harder to learn how to play when you’ve developed the technical skill, and the expectations that come along with it. As a beginner, there are still some barriers of expectation, but it’s far easier to remind yourself of the simple fact that you are a beginner, and that any such expectations are utterly ridiculous. After you’ve spent six months, or a year, or two, “learning the fundamentals” though, if you find yourself still struggling to apply those skills to the things that are truly important to you, you might just throw everything in the garbage and quit.
The “downtime” spent on things other than active learning, preferably in a more relaxing fashion, will help you process the things you’ve learned, and absorb them more fully.
It helps us learn, and process the information we absorb through the lessons. In learning, there’s time spent actually studying, doing exercises, reading instructional books, and so on. We’ll call this the “positive” space of learning, the real meat of it. And then, on the flipside of the same coin, there is the “negative space”. That is, the time in between, which we spend on pretty much everything that isn’t active learning. Eating, sleeping, watching TV, reading fiction, hanging out with friends, or playing video games.
Traditional academics, and really anything that puts a lot of focus on achievement and ambition, focuses heavily on the “positive” space of learning, and in doing so, it makes us ignore and even reject the clear benefits of the other side. Taking breaks, pushing our brain to focus on other things, playing, and sleeping are all incredibly important for the simple reason that our brain needs time to process and assess what we’ve learned. It cannot do this while it is continually taking in yet more new information.
Those who cram for exams, rather than pacing themselves and spreading things out, encounter this frequently. In order to learn optimally, we must seek balance. Balance between work and play.
Cleanly separating work and play allows us to do each whole-heartedly.
It’s common for students to get bored and distracted when forced to study and work for too long, and this can result in aimless doodling on the side. While doodling isn’t inherently bad, as a lot of people doodle while listening to lectures and find it helps them better absorb the material, it does however impact how carefully a student might complete a drawing exercise, as it pulls away some of the cognitive resources we need to be using in order to complete the work to the best of our current capacity.
By creating clearly delineated times for work and for play, we are able to burn off that nervous energy, so we can focus our cognitive resources singularly on the task at hand when it’s time to work. This also means that when we play, having done our work at our best, we can more easily allow ourselves to play without shame.
- Note: I cannot speak to how directly this applies to those of you who face learning challenges or conditions like ADHD, and I must leave it to you to try to apply this principle as well as you reasonably can. I can however say that we have students with ADHD who have worked through and benefitted from this course.
Depression and Debating
As the 50% rule relates heavily to mental health, I would be remiss not to take a moment to talk about depression. A lot of people out there will really struggle with the idea of doing something only to fail. As I’ve mentioned already, many of us have been taught that our value as an individual is inextricably tied to our ability to succeed, to the point where forcing yourself to fail (as this course will have you do quite a bit) can actively trigger depressive episodes. It gets that much worse when you consider how many people actively try and use debating as therapy (avoiding other obligations, finding friends, etc.) — not as part of a larger regimen under the guidance of a professional, but as their singular self-prescribed solution, and unfortunately it can make things worse.
For those of you in that situation, I strongly urge you to seek whatever professional support you can. Therapy with a trained professional isn’t about changing who you are, or attempting to fix you. Rather, at its core it’s about giving you the tools you need to better manage and understand your emotions, so that when you’re faced with a bad debating, you can understand not just on a logical level, but deep within you that this does not in any way suggest that you yourself are bad. So, don’t be afraid to step away from this course, and to seek out that help. We’ll still be here when you’re better equipped.
The content on this page is heavily inspired by the discussion of mental health found on Drawabox.com.
On the next page, let’s discuss the strategy to get the most value out of this course.
Next Lesson: Lesson 0-3: Using this Course
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