Prerequisite to Mastery
Date Posted: March 19th, 2010
First Megatokyo comic
Have you ever looked through the archives of great web-comics and marveled at how much the art has improved over the years? One of my favorite comics is Megatokyo and if you look at the first strips compared to the latest ones you can see an incredible improvement in the quality of the artwork. The stuff at the beginning, any competent inexperienced artist could draw. The stuff being published now… not so much.
Recent Megatokyo comic
Blogs are the same way. Look at the first few posts of a popular blog and more often than not you’ll find awkwardness. The posts then don’t flow as well as they do now. They aren’t as useful. The voice isn’t the same.
When we start a new activity it’s tempting to get frustrated at our lack of aptitude. Our first drawings are terrible. Our first song makes us cringe when we listen to it a few weeks later. Our first story has cardboard characters and stilted dialogue. We think we have no talent. We think we’ll never amount to anything.
Or maybe we don’t get as far as actually doing something. We don’t try to draw or compose or write. We don’t ask people to dance because we only know the basic. We don’t talk to our French cousins because we don’t want them to hear our terrible accent and lack of vocabulary.
Before you write yourself off think of the beginning work of your favorite artist, author, or composer. Think of your favorite speaker when she was a stuttering child. The sucking phase is normal. Few people are born with innate talent, and most of what looks like innate talent isn’t what it appears to be.
If you want to get good at something new you have to be OK with the awkward beginning phase. There’s more to mastery than that, of course, but if you can’t accept your initial mediocre output, your attempts at mastery will be dead in the water.
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