Like most people my age, my first port of call when I don’t know something is to turn to Google and YouTube. Within seconds, you can find polished tutorials for anything you can imagine and it makes life a lot easier for people like me who don’t retain information if I don’t use it regularly (see me having to repeatedly watch YouTube videos on how to use corkscrews because I never drink fancy wine).
Recently, my partner showed me this tutorial from Blender Guru. In it, he brought up something I’d never really thought about before:
“I realised that a lot of artists have a lot of self-doubt when they’re going about creating something,” says host Andrew Price. “I can’t help but feel like tutorials like mine are partly to blame.
“The tutorials you watch are like a perfect speed-run of how to do something. But when you watch it, you don’t realise the hours of experimentation, building, re-building, and then rehearsing it multiple times that lead to that perfect short format that you watch.”
I realised that I think every creative and even every freelancer is probably guilty of this. How many times do you look at what someone else is doing in your field and think that they are miles better than you, without thinking about the stress, perseverance, and sleepless nights that probably went into that? More importantly, how many times do you think other people have looked at your own work and thought the exact same thing?
In the era of being able to see everyone’s career trajectories laid out in gleaming perfection on social media, it’s hard not to compare ourselves. I remember telling my incredibly talented friend (who does the stunning illustrations for this newsletter) that I wished I could draw like her. She nonchalantly replied that her technical art skills were so rusty, and that her skills are mainly the result of spending all her time doodling throughout school. (Go check out those skills of hers here: Overheard_Galz of @overheard_galz)
At the same time as I was blown away by her ability to replicate something from real-life on paper, she was looking at trained artists and their technical skills, envying their talent as well. I’m sure those artists she admired had their own aspirations and jealousies, and so the chain goes on.
On top of that, something I’ve been grappling with recently is the pressure to somehow learn everything all at once. Learning online has become so accessible recently, it seems simultaneously so easy and yet so hard to learn new skills.
Tutorials and online courses often promise that in “a few easy steps” you can turn your career around and become a master of a new skill. I spoke to Sarah-Jane McQueen, General Manager of the online courses provider CoursesOnline about how to engage with online learning more healthily and how to pick out genuinely helpful courses from the rest.
“The biggest red flag for a course which you should stay away from is one which promises the world and makes over the top promises about how you’ll benefit from giving them your money,” said Sarah-Jane. “Much as we’d all love it to be so, one course on its own is not going to suddenly turn your life around and make you excessively wealthy.”
When it comes to motivation online, it’s also important to bear in mind that no skill comes overnight.
“There’s no shame in not succeeding in a task for the first time, whether it's related to online learning or otherwise,” Sarah-Jane continues. “As the name implies, experts are those who have been doing something specific for a long time and it would be plain wrong to hold yourself to the same standards as they would if you’re doing anything as a beginner.
“Everyone learns at their own rate and there is no real one size fits all path to success. You can do things quickly or you can do things right, and the first is not a substitute for the second.”
Let’s start looking at picture-perfect tutorials and other people’s successes more realistically.
For every one of your own successes, you know all the hard work and setbacks that went on behind the scenes. Remember that other people have those background rollercoasters too, and that experts have only got to where they are through learning from all those mistakes along the way.