There are several stages to changing one's life, just as there are several stages to improving at something. By "stage", I refer to the fact that the kind of things you are focusing on and what your bottlenecks are differ as you get better at something, which is to say, you are not merely doing things harder and faster, but there are real qualitative shifts that occur and reorient what is important to focus on.
Let me start with learning because there are several good frames around it already, and everyone has plenty of examples in their own life around learning.
However, this does not mean that not blundering is sufficient to being good, it just means it is necessary. In what way is it not enough? In the chess example it is pretty clear: some people can make moves which add up to a direction, in that they are creating a coherent army where the pieces protect one another, and can take advantage in a weakness in the opponent's setup. In other words, you need a sense of direction, amongst other things.
Another major fuck up I know of is that when people learn to draw "seriously" for the first time, they tend to make very small drawings, probably because they are afraid of having their mistakes show up in an obvious way. Not only does it limit their range of creation, it also prevents the learning process from hapenning because they are essentially trying to hide their output. Add to that the fact that small drawings tend to promote drawing from the wrist or the finger tip, as opposed to using your entire arm to draw, and the lines they end up making are quite disjoint and rough, as opposed to smooth and confident. People might think that confidence in art comes with time, but I don't think so. To me it's like going to the gym and doing exercises with poor form. No matter how strong you get, the form will not magically get better, it is crucial to fix it early on.
Another reason why copying is so important is that it implicitly trains one's ability to observe and make fine distinctions, especially if you can compare with other people, though it might be better to think of this move, compiling, as part of a phase 2.5 of learning. When you can compile and contrast, including the contrast with your own work, then suddenly the way this or that master does things becomes more self-evident.
As for myself, there are many details in art which I didn't appreciate until I found out that they were lacking in my own. I didn't appreciate the importance of line weight until I looked at my lineart which felt flat because all the lines have the same thickness. I didn't understand why manga artists would erase the background around the silhouette of their characters, until I realized that not doing that makes it very difficult to distinguish characters from the background. I didn't appreciate the importance of perspective until I did hundreds upon hundreds of poses which felt utterly flat, in a way which adding more details didn't fix. Perspective is crucial in art because it helps you make scenes feel dynamic, not so much because of the realism (though of course that is an important aspect too). On and on.
This ability to make connections between different parts of your experience is key for learning, because after all, there is no value in doing lots of things if one isn't good at connecting observations together so as to derive lessons.
Typically, schools do not encourage experimenting. There is nothing inherently nefarious about this, though some teachers can be very bitter no doubt, but mainly, this is because there is a very limited amount of time, too many students to handle at the same time, and too many incentives to create a cookie-cutter curriculum which can be reused and which is easy to evaluate people on. Which is to say, schools have their own bureaucratic demands which impose rigidity on the learning process.
As a self-learner though, you obviously do not have this constraint, which can make this process go on the other direction, where someone makes a lot of things without reflecting on it. Phase 3 is not strictly about "quantity", because phase 1 and 2 are also about acquiring experience through a lot of practice before focusing too much on quality, but it is valuable to see it as such, because interesting things emerge from dabbling, there is a commitment required for mastery which can only arise from putting a raw amount of hours in.
This is another part which schools simply do not do, again because of the time and attention constraints, which is that there is very little talk about what a particular student might want to do. It is useful, crucial perhaps, as an artist to learn anatomy, but perhaps you do not have the same obsessive attention to detail and accuracy as your teacher who only focuses on that.
As a result, phase 4 has some qualities of an individualizing phase, when you realize that your teachers are simply other people to learn from and converse with, but not inherently "better" than you, simply because you have different goals. This is where developing taste is very important. In the beginning of making art, you mainly focus on the "mechanics", which is to say linework and brushwork, the fundamentals such as perspective, figure drawing, values (shadows and lights), colors and anatomy, all of which take many many years to get good at. But without a unifying consciousness to dictate them, they are just isolated concepts. This is what distinguishes quality work from mere technical mastery. You can draw a very realistic human figure, but the result might look hollow, boring, in a way in which a seemingly lesser skilled artist might create a really appealing piece.
A notable distinction in learning is between skills which are more "objective" leaning, such as plumbery, woodworking, car repairs or whatnot, and those which are more "subjective" leaning, such as making art, dancing, etc. This is not a strict distinction, more like a continuum, but it points to an important distinction in where the intention goes, because obviously there is a great deal of pragmatic measures with being an electrician which don't exist as an artist. The worst thing that could happen with art is that you make a painting you hate, and you losing some time and the money spent on the art supplies. No big deal. The worst thing that could happen with fixing something in your electrical system is you dying. Quite a big deal I would say.
This is why the more "objective" skills need a lot of time spent learning about avoiding major mistakes, since safety is a major concern, and why the work predominantly consists in doing repetitive work in an efficient manner, without too much concern about experimentation or creativity. This doesn't make them "inferior", because nothing in our world would work without people who are more pragmatic, but it does mean that there is an internal dimension which is largely ignorable. No one cares if their plumber doesn't read great literature, but if a self-proclaimed fiction writer has never read any of the classics, then that person is probably a hack.
Another remark to make is that each "phase" is of course full of sub-skills. "Copying" for instance might discredit phase 2, which is mainly about making fine observations, since there is a great deal of intelligence and sensitivity required to compare the works of different artists. Stage 4 in particular provides a major distinction between two forms of integration, the first one which has the quality of putting parts and metaphorical bolts together, and the second one being a more holistic synthesis, the kind that imbues your life with a certain aura, with rituals which do not feel like LARPs but which feel like embodied acts within an enchanted reality.
As such, it might be useful to add a fifth stage to all of this, the phase of creation or synthesis. A wholly new (which includes reigniting the forgotten old) way of doing something which is integrated with other parts of your life, and which feels like a coherent whole, and not just a series of ideas from other people and stitched together like a patchwork.
I jokingly title this piece "another bullshit framework of learning", not because I think the ideas and concepts aren't useful, but because in reality, no one approaches learning in such a linear fashion. You can only spend time doing something if you enjoy it, which means that maximizing for excitement is probably the "best" way to learn something quite frankly. Frameworks around learning promise you to learn "faster" than people who don't think about it as much, but ultimately the bottleneck is always and will always be how much you care about something, which is not at the level of ideas or frameworks.
It's a bit like how mediocre scientists constantly talk about the "scientific method" to normies, when in reality, serious scientists do not really thinks about that, and especially not the most revolutionary ones, and instead mostly navigate on their curiosity and experience.
So not only is the excitement and curiosity aspect totally ignored in this "framework" of learning, but the social aspect is too. I think many self-learners will report that they miss having a group of people with whom they could talk about what they are learning, because those conversations tend to be incredibly powerful in terms of learning, but also in terms of excitement about the subject.
Which is why I think a lot of conversations around learning and the future of education are very misguided. Information and "proper techniques" are good to spread, of course they are, but ultimately, learning is an ecological process, like anything that matters. It's about integrating a person into something greater than themselves. After all, what's the point of having really smart and competent people if they do not feel connected to other people, a greater sense of purpose, and we could say the Universe at large? Care is always going to be the bottleneck in any activity.
1 Or rather one possible second phase, because activities and people can differ a lot, and learning is not strictly sequential anyway
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2025-07-28