“What trick should I Learn next?”
This is both the easiest and the hardest question. The easy answer is ‘any trick you don’t already know’. The hard answer is find what moves or inspires you.
I teach yoyo. I do many other things in the yoyo world, but first and foremost I teach, it’s who I am. I haven’t been on top of making tutorials lately, as injuries and chronic pain have limited my yoyoing time and as a result I’m not creating and perfecting new material often enough. I do still attend the Vancouver Yoyo club and teach there, as well as my school yoyo club
When a kid asks me the question, generally I answer it with one of my own “What do you know? What is the hardest thing you can do?” The next thing is generally either an evolution of that trick (from elevator to brain twister, from Houdini mount to soiled panties), or a lateral move (you know cold fusion? How about Spirit bomb, it’s time to get your wrist mount on).
What I really run into as a challenge when faced with that question is my memory. I have both learned and created hundreds of tricks in my 8 years yoyoing and forgotten almost all of them. What always makes me laugh is when a kid names one of my tricks and asks me to help them with it. I have to pull up my website and find my own tutorial and watch it to quickly re-learn the trick!
How do you answer this question? Do you have a go-to trick list you keep in your head? A single trick you teach everyone? (When I joined the Vancouver Yoyo club 8 years ago, Gary Li forced everyone to learn “Soiled Panties” no matter how noob they were).
I’ve been doing a daily series of unedited simple element tutorials. Here are a couple, check out the “1 take tutorials” playlist for all of them!
Happy teaching!