How We Get Good at Something

It takes mundane, often boring, always repetitive practice. And often a whole lot of it.

We learn by doing and not by thinking.

This strikes me as relevant to mastering any skill, and reminds me of George Leonard's "Mastery" (a bit of a summary of Mastery can be found by Todd Becker, who prompted me to read Mastery in the first place — it's a quick, inspiring/challenging book).

Watching that video reminds me of how I "became an artist." I did a lot of art/cartooning as a kid and people would say to me, "You're talented." Being an artist was then, and still is today, looked at as some sort of "gift" bestowed from the heavens (and or my genetics). I've never believed this personally though.

How I became an artist was much simpler: I kept trying to copy the cartoon image of Super Mario over and over and over again, doing it better and better each time. I remember doing it 20-30 times one night for my classmates in maybe 1^st grade. What I didn't realize at the time was that I was inadvertently practicing how to copy something I saw with my eyes and put it down onto paper. Without any prompting or structured learning from parents or teachers, I trained myself as a five or six year old to draw cartoons.

This is the lunchbox that made me an artist:

This is how we learn: practice, perseverance, stumbling, and trial and error.