The first step to becoming anything - an artist, a programmer, a fit dude - is falling in love with the process, or at least developing the discipline to practi

The first step to becoming anything - an artist, a programmer, a fit dude - is falling in love with the process, or at least developing the discipline to practice regularly. I heard from gym people that just being at the gym free regularly without even doing anything there is a better first step than going all out once then never going again. In a similar vein there is a wonderful video essay called The Toolbox Fallacy. It's about how people fancy themselves artists and keep delaying the things that would make them an artist. They wait for the right degree, the right tools, the right breakthrough. In the end, painting is what makes a painter, not collecting paintbrushes. I could only apply this advice when I accepted that the output of my work would suck for a while. I went to sketching sessions and sketched wildly deformed bodies. But damn it I was drawing. Same with blogging, and with talking to strangers. In the words of a cartoon dog, "sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something". While most wisdom is gained as you age, this one is progressively lost. We lose the ability to play, and the willingness to fail.