"darwinist"
gmail.com> wrote in message
news:6780636c-2775-47f1-b5ba-8803c1931299@v1g2000pra.googlegroups.com...
On Jul 23, 11:52 pm, "Jack" yahoo.com> wrote:>> There are lots of things you may want to get good at: Things required
>> for your job, hobbies, games, social-interaction, creative arts,
>> cooking, managing time, managing money, making scale matchstick
>> replicas of famous architecture.
>
>> Whatever you want to do and do well, it's important not to make your
>> education too narrow, or put all your eggs in one basket. For example
>> you can read all the books you want about drawing but there's a lot
>> you won't learn until you start drawing for yourself. The physical
>> skills and spatial awareness that you need to make a picture work, and
>> your own particular strengths and weaknesses won't become apparent
>> without practice.
>
>> That doesn't mean that reading about drawing won't help. A lot of
>> useful techniques or exercises can be learned from the experience of
>> other people, and someone with great skill and accuracy might still
>> have a very limited drawing style until their eyes are opened by the
>> examples of others.
>
>> Habits matter as well as skills and knowledge. If you only do rough
>> drafts of something before moving on to something else then you won't
>> end up refining your work or learning as much as you could from what
>> you've just done. If you draw every part of every drawing at the same
>> speed then some parts won't get the detail that they need while others
>> will take up more time than they should. If you wait until the idea is
>> perfectly clear in every detail in your mind before you start drawing
>> then you may never get started, or you may only be able to work on the
>> most simple of pictures. On the other hand if you never stop to think
>> or re-assess how the picture should look and just continue making
>> marks on the paper then you may end up with messy, cluttered work that
>> you don't like no matter how much you work on it.
>
>> Besides your ability at the specific task, there are other things you
>> need to learn to make drawing a rewarding and balanced part of your
>> life. Any activity can conflict with others. If you spend too much
>> money on drawing supplies then it will conflict with other things you
>> need money for. You could instead do most of your stuff with cheap
>> pencil and only choose some things to refine with more expensive inks
>> and paints. You could also spend too much time on your drawing, or do
>> it at the wrong times when you've got important things to attend to
>> that are more urgent, while really the drawing could wait. The reverse
>> of using too much time and money is also possible, and if you don't
>> make enough room in your life to draw, then other things will trample
>> all over it.
>
>> One of the most useful things you can do, is execute complete drawing
>> projects, big and small, from start to finish. This tests all of the
>> things you need to learn about drawing in real-world conditions. You
>> could do a lot of little drawing exercises to refine your skills, and
>> you could make grand plans for the kinds of big, complete drawings
>> that you'd like to finish, but these two things alone won't teach you
>> about the time-management, re-drafting, refinement, persistence and
>> balancing with other parts of your life that are required to complete
>> real-life projects.
>
>> It can be very useful to engage in exercises where the product doesn't
>> really matter and the only goal is learning and practice, but when you
>> move to real-life projects there are often obstacles you didn't
>> expect. Theoretical knowledge can also be very useful, but when
>> applying this knowledge to real-life projects you will get a much
>> clearer idea of what the more important things are that you've
>> learned, and what else you need to learn.
>
>> So in the same way that you have to get out of the parking lot and
>> drive the streets with your supervisor before you'll be able to pass
>> your driving test, and in the same way that after years and years of
>> schooling, doctors have to be an intern for another year before
>> they're allow to practice medicine by themselves; you have to embark
>> on real drawing projects to properly learn to apply the things you've
>> learned about drawing.
>
>> Real-life achievement is the final and ultimate test for anything you
>> want to be good at doing, but to do well on that test you need to
>> focus on all of the kinds of education mentioned: You need to develop
>> theoretical knowledge, practical skill and entrenched good habits.
>> Furthermore you need to focus on making the pursuit fit in with the
>> rest of your life, which requires another set of knowledge, skills and
>> habits.
>
>> It might seem like this is a lot to attend to, but neglecting any one
>> of these things will lead to frustration, setbacks and wasted time. If
>> your performance at something is failing due to lack of skill, and you
>> try to fill the gap with more knowledge, then you will be wasting your
>> time and get frustrated. Likewise if you're highly skilled but
>> ignorant of many of the techniques and strategies that exist for doing
>> what you want then you'll be held back. If you're very good at all
>> aspects of a particular activity except that it frequently comes into
>> conflict with other things in your life, then you won't get the
>> enjoyment and results that you would otherwise be able to get.
>
>> In short, learning to be good at something requires several kinds of
>> learning. If you cover them all then you can improve a lot and enjoy
>> doing so. If you neglect any of them then you will expend too much
>> effort for too little reward.
>
> Very nicely written, darwinist. Sometime, would you expand on that idea of
> entrenching good habits?
Ok. For example: To get your driver's license you need to know the
road rules, and some of them - like speed limits - are clearly,
regularly posted on the side of the road. Nonetheless some people
speed. If you regularly do things like speed, tailgate, ignore stop-
signs, break-suddenly, etc, then these will become your normal
behaviours and although you might have the knowledge and skill
required to be a good driver, you'll still be a bad driver in many
ways because you have trained yourself to break useful guidelines
rather than to follow them and this will become the easiest way for
you to continue driving.
Or: I'm a computer programmer and each project helps to increase my
skill by providing practice at the kinds of problem-solving required.
As for knowledge, the internet has no end of useful tips and tricks
that can save me time by seeing how others have done exactly (or
almost) what I want to do. Something that I can't get from other
people, and won't happen automatically with practice, though, is good
habits. These include writing clear and sufficient comments in my
code, making it more organised once I've got it working, testing
thoroughly as I go and keeping good documentation about what changes
have been made. I'm not saying these are things I always get right,
but it's something I have to do on top of acquiring knowlege and
skills.
So whatever you're doing there are usually guidelines worth following
that increase your performance or chances of success, and decrease the
dangers or setbacks. You might know these but not follow them. If you
follow them whenever you remember to, then they soon (over a few
weeks) become habits that are easy to remember and hard to break.
Likewise if you don't follow them then this (less effective) approach
also becomes easy to remember and hard to break.
So if you want to learn to do something well, entrenched habits are as
important to long-term performance as practical skill and theoretical
knowledge.
----------------------------------
Yes and when the day to day things you have to do become habits it frees up
your mind to work on novel situations.
