I think the implication is that you should try to create something away from the internet, note how the poster goes to a class and creates a beat and is getting positive reinforcement from people at the class
If he had created a beat on his own, posted it on soundcloud/youtube and posted, say, on reddit, he would've likely gotten trolled or put down or compared to any number of amazing beatmakers and it would have added to his depression instead of helping him get over it.
I don't think we are equipped to deal with the fact that there is somebody younger than us better at anything we can think of than we could ever be, and those somebodies are also instantly accessible from anywhere at any time for comparison purposes.
In the old days, say, you could tell yourself "ok, the teacher/master craftsman/... that is teaching me is so much better than me because they have a lifetime of experience, when I will be their age I will have learned and will be just as good", but now you can find endless amounts of people younger than you already amazing at what you are trying to do, and you think to yourself what's the point when they are already there and you have just started.
Nowadays with most of the world connected you can find hundreds of "one in a million" people you can compare yourself to: and if you are depressed it is really really hard to want to get started at anything, because getting started at something means months or years of being objectively pretty bad at it, months where you can tell yourself "what's the point, youtubeuser999 is a kid and they're already better at this than I ever will be"
It is also hard because one of the ways to get better, is to compare yourself to people better than you and try to figure out what they are doing that you aren't, and incorporate that in your practice. If you are in a beginner art class with a teacher walking around and you are all around the same level, you can get a lot of benefit from looking at others and listening in.
But if, thanks to the internet, you have Michelangelo on your left, Leonardo on the right, Vermeer in front of you and Tintoretto behind, and you are just trying to learn to draw a face that doesn't look like Frankenstein, it is going to be extremely discouraging.
> You have been trained to require external validation for your work. Maybe it's a modern thing with upvotes and twitter and likes and whatnot.
And simply the fact that, nowadays, you have access to the production of thousands of other people, with which you can compare yours. And in most cases it will compare unfavourably; to make it worse, almost all those people are unknown to the general public, they are often not even professionals, they are just very ordinary persons with a hobby, and yet you can see in a couple of clicks that they get (much) better results than you do.
On may call this a self-validation based on external elements.
Perhaps, as it devalues your creations in your own eyes, it reinforces the need for external validation.
> If you're an artist or a musician or a developer or, well anything really, what does it mean to be able to go online and are hundreds, thousands, millions of people who are far better at a thing than you are?
No different than when a child leaves grade school and finds that the Varsity baseball team (or soccer team or whatever) is on a league above-and-beyond their abilities. You either get better to join the level of the competition, or you drop out.
It happens again in the highschool -> college transition.
Learning your place in the world is part of growing up. Any kid growing up thinking they're hot stuff because of their performance in grade school gets a rude wakeup call in high school and/or college.
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As a Kid, I thought I was pretty good at chess. Turns out my adult skill in chess is roughly class D and I peaked at 1500 Elo (and as an adult, I'm way better at chess than I used to be).
As a kid, I also thought I was good at Starcraft: Brood War. I even played the Blizzard ladder pretty decently. But when I sought the competitive community, I barely made rank D- on Teamliquid.
I always was reasonably humble about my abilities with regards to sports, but I have plenty of friends who got a rude awakening that their skills weren't varsity level. I fortunately was in less egotistical sports, such as Track and Field, where the teams are always accepting of you regardless of your abilities. A runner who can do 5-minute miles would rather run with a teammate for good discussion / less boredom, even if those teammates are 1 to 2-minutes slower.
Its better to learn your place in the world sooner, rather than later. Getting blasted with the right amount of humility is more important for proper psychological development than thinking you're the best at the world at (insert sport / activity / skill here) and just being completely delusional until adulthood.
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As we grow up and specialize into various subjects, the opposite happens. Suddenly I'm an "expert" and there's no one to talk to about say... GPU programming. I have to work extremely hard to find a community of people who know much about the subject, despite not having worked very much (relatively speaking) on becoming an expert on this subject.
Its because the number of GPU-programmers is much smaller than say, the number of people who try to get good at running a mile, play baseball, or play chess.
> But what if he tried to pick up playing the flute? How about drawing comics? Competitive swimming? Investing?
Having seen exactly 2 of your examples in real life, particularly people who had no experience and no interest in painting or playing an instrument until their 40s, a few years of persistence and targeted practice made them better than me after a lifetime of “casual play”.
I might have to put in less time to “get better than them” if I really sat down and tried for a year, but I’m not sure that matters in the way you’re thinking
> If I create something, but nobody ever sees it, did I create it at all? Doesn't feel like it.
You have been trained to require external validation for your work. Maybe it's a modern thing with upvotes and twitter and likes and whatnot.
If you create a thing, then you have drawn on your skills, probably improving them. Whether the thing is seen by others is irrelvant. What is relevant is your experience in creating it, and the use of it (whether it has a use, or just has aesthetic value).
Maybe practice by creating something, then destroying it, as if it had never existed. What remains? Memory and skill, both of great value.
> It's better to do nothing, than to deliver more shit.
How are you supposed to get better at delivering anything if you won't deliver until you have something "perfect"?
Part of the process of getting better is to be shit for a while, while you figuring things out.
Common saying when making music is that probably your first 100 songs will be absolutely trash, so better get those out of the door ASAP, so you can get to the good stuff :) Practice is the only way to get better, and your output will probably suck for a while, but we all sucked at one point so it's OK.
If the approach to encouragement is to require artisinal comparisons for success, then you're alienating many right out of the gate.
Most kids loathe piano lessons. But they can still be 10-100X better at it than anyone here and not need to stroke their egos by calling themselves artists.
>The problem with trying to create something is once you begin to work hard at it, you realize that you're not very good and others have done it far better than you.
But the only way to get very good and end up being one of those "others" who make the best things is to push past this point and keep making things anyway. Of course you're not the best in the world at something when you first start doing it. Nobody was. How could you be?
Well, even when we learn to read and write, and learn maths, is that not self-improvement? Do we learn this things because they are beneficial and useful in our lives; or is it just a matter of achieving the highest score?
When you write things on this forum; is your only motivation to receive the most upvotes and get the highest score?
Just because something is useful to society, doesn't mean that it will have no use for ourselves, does it?
>>One thing that often turns me off is seeing others which do that activity for quite some time and are already good at it (I'm 35 years old), while I'm just starting and seem incapable in comparison.
Be the best person you can be and try (it's very hard) to stop comparing yourself. How can you be anything more than your best? Do it because its good for you or you enjoy it, not because you are awesome or not awesome at it.
> Maybe there is a base level of competence you need to attain before an activity starts being enjoyable for its own sake.
This has been on mind so much. I think that level we call base level is often set by comparison to other skilled people that we look upto o compare our progress against. And of course comparison is a thief of joy and results more in disappointment that not. In activities I've picked, i usually just see if im truly enjoying it, if theres potential depths to explore in the future and then go with the mantra - Disregard everything else. I hope that makes sense.
O man, drawing is something I'd commited to learn as well although I really it has a steep learning curve. But its the same deal with anything no? Gotta keep going through the grind before we can get good at it and the best way that happens is if we can enjoy the process itself. So yeah I guess I'm just agreeing with you :)
"You will look around and find other people at your age who are way better than you at playing guitar, skating or singing. How can you possibly be as good as them? They must have a talent for it! But in reality, all they did was starting earlier than you or have been spending more time doing it."
Hogwash. I started singing and playing guitar at the same time as some friends of mine. We spent the same amount of time - if anything, I probably spent more time than they did. They got better. I didn't - well, not to the same degree as they did (I'm not bad but nowhere near what some of them can do).
> All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.
On the whole, I agree with his sentiment that hard work will get you success, but the idea he magically started out with some kind of innate talent for telling whether or not things are good is the same type of illogical thinking he's talking about being discouraging to beginners.
> Mastering the fundamentals will make you 'good' to a level that very few people ever reach.
Can you clarify this? Is this because most people don't care about mastering the fundamentals in the first place? I can't tell whether I'm missing something and the idea is more complex, or that's what you're saying.
> The way you reach monetary/economic success as a musician is usually about non-music-related stuff you do, which is strange because in most professions, the way you become successful is by practicing your art and honing your skills.
Seems like this is actually common to every profession where other people matter to your success... which is almost every profession. On HN, one usually hears this same idea framed as coding/design/product versus business/selling/marketing. I think people in most lines of work would agree that as long as you are not incompetent it is personal relationships, image, persuasion, and all of those 'soft' skills that that matter more to (financial) success than technical skill.
> The separation of talent and skill is one of the greatest misunderstood concepts for people who are trying to excel, who have dreams, who want to do things. Talent you have naturally. Skill is only developed by hours and hours and hours of beating on your craft.
- Will Smith
This kind of exploration, banging your head against the wall, is exactly "beating on your craft".
No matter if the result is crappy by any metric, trying to wrap one's head around things and producing output - any output - over and over is oh so important.
And dare I say talent without practice is useless and a waste, because one's going to stay in the comfort zone, and usually get cocky about it, whereas relentless practice teaches humility.
> That regardless of what you're interested in or seemingly good at, that there will always be hundreds or thousands better than you at it.
When I come across these people, rather than feeling inferior to them, I try to learn what I can from them so that I can do and be better the next time.
Feeling inferior is nothing more than an (likely false) acknowledgement that you don't want to be a lifelong learner.
If he had created a beat on his own, posted it on soundcloud/youtube and posted, say, on reddit, he would've likely gotten trolled or put down or compared to any number of amazing beatmakers and it would have added to his depression instead of helping him get over it.
I don't think we are equipped to deal with the fact that there is somebody younger than us better at anything we can think of than we could ever be, and those somebodies are also instantly accessible from anywhere at any time for comparison purposes.
In the old days, say, you could tell yourself "ok, the teacher/master craftsman/... that is teaching me is so much better than me because they have a lifetime of experience, when I will be their age I will have learned and will be just as good", but now you can find endless amounts of people younger than you already amazing at what you are trying to do, and you think to yourself what's the point when they are already there and you have just started.
Nowadays with most of the world connected you can find hundreds of "one in a million" people you can compare yourself to: and if you are depressed it is really really hard to want to get started at anything, because getting started at something means months or years of being objectively pretty bad at it, months where you can tell yourself "what's the point, youtubeuser999 is a kid and they're already better at this than I ever will be"
It is also hard because one of the ways to get better, is to compare yourself to people better than you and try to figure out what they are doing that you aren't, and incorporate that in your practice. If you are in a beginner art class with a teacher walking around and you are all around the same level, you can get a lot of benefit from looking at others and listening in.
But if, thanks to the internet, you have Michelangelo on your left, Leonardo on the right, Vermeer in front of you and Tintoretto behind, and you are just trying to learn to draw a face that doesn't look like Frankenstein, it is going to be extremely discouraging.
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