If you're reading this blog, chances are you're interested in game development, drawing, music production or programming. I want to talk about learning and improving these skills. For the rest of this blog post I will be using drawing as an example, but what I'm about to tell you will apply to any other skill. The reason why I'm writing this is that lately I've been really trying to become better at drawing, and so that's what's on my mind right now the most. I noticed that the way I approached the task at first was very flawed, and I noticed that others also made similar mistakes that ultimately slow down their progress. I'm writing this as a little observation on learning.
Ok, so let's say you want to learn how to draw really well. You probably watched anime at one point in your life and thought to yourself "Hey it'd be pretty fun if I could be able to do this". Or maybe you're a game developer and want to spice your game up with some 2d anime girls. Or maybe you wanna draw comics. We both know that at least once or twice in your life you thought about how cool it would be if you could draw your own hentai (no? just me? eehhhh moving on...). Either way, there is some motivation for you to start learning how to draw. But then what happens is that you see all of these other artists who have been drawing since they were kids and are effing art wizards now, and you feel like it's too late to start now. If only you started practicing earlier, when you were a kid, by now you would have become a pro surely. You don't know how many people I've met who were interested in learning how to draw, but didn't even start learning because they thought that it's too late. The thing is, I have never seen a logic more flawed. For some reason, society really likes to feed us this idea that once you hit a certain age you stop learning, and that only kids can really learn skills well, and that if you start later in life you will never be able to achieve mastery. If anything, the complete opposite is correct, adults can learn skills much more efficient than kids. So what if that 14yo kid drew for 10 years? Kids are dumb. If you really put your mind to it and practice, you can pass that kid in less then 2 years. The thing is that you have to practice. You will need to draw a lot. Even though you are smarter than that kid and you need a lot fewer drawings to improve, you will still need a lot of them. You need to start today, and you need to draw every day. And don't give me any of this "I don't have the time" nonsense. You do. if you have the time to read this, you have the time to draw. You don't have to draw for 6 hours every day. Just 30 minutes will do. Sit down in front of your pencil and paper or your drawing tablet and set a timer. Timebox a 30-minute interval to draw something. If you draw for 30 minutes every day, you will become good in less then 2 years.
So what now? You managed to get motivated to sit down, your timer is on and ticking, you are holding a pencil in your hand and looking at the paper aaaaand nothing. Before you know it the 30 minutes are over and your paper is still empty. This is one of the problems that result in so many people improving so slowly. They are so caught up in deciding what to draw that they end up spending more time thinking than actually drawing. With time, as you get better at drawing, you will start getting more ideas and this will gradually become less of a problem. But in the beginning, it's a very large problem. My advice on what to do is simple. Remember what your motivation for learning to draw is. Do you want to become really good at drawing anime girls so that you can make visual novels? Then draw an anime girl. Don't think about it. Don't try and decide up-ahead her hair length or her clothes design. You only have 30 minutes remember? Just start drawing her eye, then go to the mouth, then start randomly putting in hair. Remember that this is only practice. You don't have to draw a masterpiece. Rather the opposite, aim to just put anything on the paper, no matter how bad or unoriginal it is. You are only practicing at this stage, originality and ideas will come as you get better. It doesn't matter what you draw. You can literally draw the same exact drawing as yesterday. The less time you spend thinking about what to draw, the more time you will have to actually draw. There is this one person on twitter who just drew images of Cirno for 999 days. They literally just drew the same character every day for 999 days. There was no way for them not to improve with that much practice. So don't worry about what to draw. Just remember what it is that you want to accomplish with drawing. If you want to be able to draw anime girls, then just draw an anime girl. Draw the same one as yesterday, it doesn't matter, You'll have plenty of time to be original when you become good.
Also, a lot of people are so obsessed with trying to draw a masterpiece every time they draw. They are so afraid of drawing poorly that they would rather not draw at all then make a drawing that sucks. They are afraid that they will fail if they try. Why would I even draw the other eye if it's just gonna be asymmetrical anyway, might as well draw long bangs over it, that way the drawing will look a lot less like a failure. Don't even try to tell me that you never thought of doing that, you probably even did it in the end. Let me tell you right now, this isn't the way to improve. You will never learn to draw eyes symmetrically if you don't draw them asymmetrical first. And by that I mean a lot. Draw faces over and over, draw that other eye. When you finish take a look at it. Observe how beautifully crappy it looks. It might even be worse than some of your previous ones. It doesn't matter. Practice is practice. Every time you fail at something, you become one step closer to becoming good at it. Don't judge yourself at how poorly you're doing right now. Everyone drew uneven eyes when they started learning. Just don't sit down with the intention to draw a masterpiece. Sit down with the intention to fail. Aim to fail.
Do you know the story of Babe Ruth, the professional baseball player? For many years in a row, he held both the home-run record and the strikeout record. That means that he had both the most successful strikes, but also the most failed ones. And he didn't just fail a lot, he failed more than anyone else. Yet he also had the most home-runs. He was the best because he failed the most. And this isn't just an isolated example. We see this with successful people everywhere.
Take this quote from Michael Jordan:
"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
So if you want to become the best at drawing, the only thing you need to do is to fail the most. It's that simple. Just set a goal to draw a few bad drawings every day. Aim to fail. If you draw 10000 bad drawings, there's no way you won't become good. You need to celebrate your failures. Have a pencil and a piece of paper everywhere you go. Have them at every table you sit at during your day. Take any moment you have to draw. Are you waiting for your coffee? Draw an eye. Drinking the coffee? Draw the other eye. The eyes end up uneven and look like crap? Celebrate the fact that you are one failure closer to your goal of 10000 failures. With every bad drawing you do you get one step closer to becoming the artist you want to be. We have been conditioned our whole life to feel bad when we fail, but this is a very toxic attitude and will only do you harm. I want you to give yourself an imaginary pat on the back every time you draw a crappy drawing. Become a failure machine. That's the only way you can really become good at something.
A lot of people feel like they need to be good right from the beginning. They try to start learning a skill. They take a pencil and paper and try to draw a face. And obviously, they fail. Everyone fails the first time. There's no such thing as talent. Talent is a word made by lazy people to have an excuse not to practice. Everyone learns the same way, by practicing a lot. There is no magical "talent" that will let you bypass practice. You will fail the first time you try something. You will fail the first 100 times you try something. A lot of people judge themselves by this and decide that drawing just isn't for them. They try to learn to draw in a week. Obviously, a week is too short of a time period to see any improvement.
There is a quote I really like, it goes:
"The human brain drastically overestimates what it can do in 10 attempts and drastically underestimates what it can do in 10000 attempts."
Stop making judgments on small data samples. Don't quit drawing because you've been going at it for a month already but you aren't seeing any progress. It's only normal not to see any progress that fast, I would be very surprised if you were to tell me that you did learn how to draw in a month.
Just remember the dream, imagine all the cute anime girls you'll get to draw when you get there, and continue practicing. Aim to fail. There's no such thing as talent. If you draw 10000 crappy drawings you will inevitably become good.
Now stop wasting your time on the internet and go draw something.
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