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I think you hit the nail on the head. It's good advice, particularly if you're someone with a short attention span who's constantly jumping from project to proj
by nmfisher 6y ago
I think you hit the nail on the head. It's good advice, particularly if you're someone with a short attention span who's constantly jumping from project to project.
Nowadays, it's so easy to see just how far the talent pool is across the globe. You see the awesome cello player on Instagram, the amazing 3D games artist on Twitter, the world class gymnast on TikTok. You get so excited and inspired, and naturally, you want to be able to do the same.
But you can't pick up three things at once. Those people are exceptional because they focused on one thing - and only one thing only - for a long time. You only see what they produce, not the countless years of practice and frustration and experimentation that it took for them to get there.
That's not saying you can't get good at multiple things. But particularly for adults (who have far less free time than children), you are much better off concentrating on a single "improvement" goal at any one time. Maintain your other skills, sure, but accept that other people will overtake you in those areas. If you try and compete with everyone at everything, you'll just end up losing.
- toyg 6y agoIndeed. Also, nobody posts their failures online. You only see success, and the path to that success is hidden or even misrepresented (“I made this in an afternoon!” ... and 5 years working 8h/day on the necessary skills).
- tonyarkles 6y agoI've started to make a conscious effort to post about my failures on Twitter specifically to help address that a bit, especially when they're hilariously bad (e.g. crashing a model airplane 3 seconds into its flight). Naturally, I've been failing at doing this consistently :)
- robotnikman 6y agoI'm starting to find that people making posts about their failures offer me more value than people who post about their success. Reading them usually helps me be less hard on myself, and also sometimes provide insights into how to avoid such pitfalls myself in the future
- tonyarkles 6y agoThat is 100% what I'm going after! I screw up all the time, figure out what I did wrong, and iterate. No one ever sees the 37 steps that went wrong before the successful outcome.
- nmfisher 6y agoDefinitely! It's understandable to want to hide the 99 crappy things you did before the 100th that came out looking good. What's more, a lot of us actively go back and scrub the failures from our history. It's stupid, but I'm guilty of it too. I am trying to catch myself, though. It's easier to be more candid once you start having a bit of success.
- psychomugs 6y agoReminds me of this (dubious) Picasso story: "It always reminds me of the story about the woman who approached Picasso in a restaurant, asked him to scribble something on a napkin, and said she would be happy to pay whatever he felt it was worth. Picasso complied and then said, “That will be $10,000.” “But you did that in thirty seconds,” the astonished woman replied. “No,” Picasso said. “It has taken me forty years to do that.”" Apocryphal or not, the point of the arduous and often frustrating process hiding behind the product is relevant to any skill.