Motivation, aiming to fail, and how to actually improve at a skill

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.

Timeboxing and self-help books

Ok so for pretty much my entire life I've been a very unproductive procrastinating anime-watching time-wasting whiny little loser.

Recently though, since I got into a university, I realized that if I want to not be miserable for my entire life, I should probably start practicing some more willpower and self-discipline. So I decided to finally suck it up and actually go do something productive read a bunch of self-help books and fill my browser history with motivational blog posts. You know, stuff like this, this and this.

Now, during my perusal of this material, I noticed a lot of reoccurring subjects. Among those, one of the things that stood out to me was the concept of Timeboxing. It was so simple and so easy to implement that I felt guilty for not coming up with it myself. Basically, the idea is to set a timer whenever you are doing a task and in theory, this should make it so that you use the time allotted a lot more efficiently (no pun intended). This takes advantage of our natural inclination to procrastinate and of the fact that we are much more productive when there's a deadline to obey.

So I started trying to implement this into my own life. I started timeboxing my daily activities such as studying for university, doing homework, working out, practicing my drawing skills, watching hentai learning Japanese and other such productive, stuff-i-want-to-get-done projects.

The thing I misunderstood though, and this is something that they usually don't talk that much about when talking about timeboxing, is how much time you need to give to the task. I was under the impression that the timeboxes need to be very short. I would give myself 20 minutes to do as much homework as possible, and then I would stop and do something else, and later come back for another 20 minutes, and so on. The thing I realized, later on, was that for a lot of mental activities, such as studying, doing homework, or practicing drawing or any other skill, the mind needs some time to warm up. The first 15 minutes or so are very unproductive and slow, but after that, the brain picks up the pace and starts working very efficiently. Now you see what the problem was, I was cutting my "productive time" right when it started getting productive. I would only get 5 minutes of results from 20 minutes of work. This started stacking up and before I knew it I was wasting very large amounts of time every day "warming up" to work instead of actually getting anything done.

It made me realize that if I wanted to actually spend my time efficiently, I needed to do a few long timeboxes, rather than a lot of very short ones. The thing is, even though you need to put a deadline in order to be productive, the deadline also needs to be realistic. Basically, you need to take into account the time you think you should need in order to complete a task. Let's say you need to do homework that you feel like you should need around an hour to complete. Give yourself an hour and a half long timebox for doing it. That half an hour of extra time should be enough to compensate for warming up and any distractions that may arise. It's ok to have more time than you need, and if you complete ahead of time, that's even better. Let's do some simple math and see how much this actually is better than doing multiple timeboxes of 20mins. Since, as I explained earlier, you only get 5mins of work per 20min timebox. That means that you will need to do 60/5=12 timeboxes in order to complete your one-hour long homework. Since every timebox lasts 20mins, that's 12*20=240mins. That means that you would need to spend 4 hours doing your homework when you could have spent only 1.5 hours on it if you were to use a larger timebox. You see what I mean?

Now, you may be asking, "If it's better to have a longer timebox, then why not go all the way and give yourself the entire day to complete the task? And if you finish early even better, there's literally nothing to be lost", and that would be a good point indeed.

Let me now introduce you to The Other Benefit Of Timeboxing. You see, your brain doesn't operate on the same amount of power all the time. Sometimes you are tired, or annoyed, or hungry, or there is something else distracting you that makes you work slower. Now, the priority should always be trying to reduce all distractions, but sometimes you aren't really aware of them, or you just can't for some other reason. This usually lengthens the time needed to complete the task by quite a lot. You ever had one of those days when you tried studying, but you ended up not doing anything the entire time? Let's go back to the 1-hour homework example from earlier. Let's say that you gave it a timebox of the entire day, instead of the 1.5h we discussed. Now, if you were completely rested and free of distractions, you would complete the homework in around an hour, and it wouldn't really matter if the timebox was 1.5h or 15h. But look now what happens in the situation that your brain isn't working for some reason, maybe you haven't slept well or something. Doing homework in this state can jump from taking just 1 hour to taking up to 10 hours. So if you set a timebox that is very large, you would spend 10 hours on the homework. Now let's see what happens if we put the 1.5h timebox back into action. It will force you to stop doing the task if it's taking longer than it should. Now you can notice that you are actually tired, and you can go and take a 30min nap for example. When you come back from the nap you should be well-rested and ready to work at maximum efficiency. Now you can do another 1.5h timebox, and if you really had a good rest (or got rid of any other distractions that were causing you to work slowly) this 1.5h timebox should be enough for you to finish that 1h homework. In total, you spent 1.5+0.5+1.5=3.5h instead of the 10h that you would have spent if you were to try and do it in one go. It's almost one-third of the time. Do you see now how timeboxing can also work as a fail-safe defense from spending more time than you need on something? A lot of times we aren't really aware of the fact that we are working at sub-optimal brainpower, or we just aren't looking at the clock. We waste entire days doing nothing when we could have been so much more productive if we used timeboxing.

In summary, what I want to say is that choosing the right length for your timebox is more complicated than it may appear at first. As we saw, have it too long or too short and you are losing too much time for no reason. I am currently trying to become better at judging the optimal timebox for doing my tasks.

Yeah, that's pretty much all I wanted to say. I don't really write a lot, so I probably won't be making a lot of posts like this. It's just that I felt like talking about this somewhere, and I didn't wanna annoy any of my friends with it. And so it ended up here.

See ya later!