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skill

How to become an expert at any skill

by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday December 17, 2008

Follow three rules and become an expert on any skill you love.

I had a discussion with my counselor about the whole talent thing. How I had decided to spent much more time on drawing (and less time on other things) because I think that will give me a change to become an expert.
She didn’t agree. She thinks that talent does matter. She played a musical instrument in her teens. Although she practiced for years she never got very good.

Thinking about that I realized that she had a point.
My mother bought her piano in 1968 when we moved to Waddinxveen. When she died in 1989 she had been practicing for more then 20 years, strictly one hour a day.
But she never got any better then mediocre.

So how is this possible?
Why is it that some people practice for 10,000 hours and become world class artists and others practice for well over 10,000 hours and never get to be more the mediocre.
Is it talent?
I hope not.
Because if it’s talent I’m screwed. The last one and a half year have shown that I have no drawing talent what so ever.

A few years ago I bought a harmonica. It seemed like a fun instrument to play. It also seemed a fairly easy instrument to master even for someone with no musical talent.
But it turned out to be a very difficult instrument.
I had bought a few books on musical theory but none of them made any sense to me. And how ever hard I tried I never was able to blow a single note.
After a few months I gave up and threw everything out.

A few months ago my interest was rekindled by one of the videos Youtube recommended. I researched harmonicas on the Net and found a wealth of information on the kind of instrument you should start with and a lot of free music and some instructional videos on Youtube.
A nice read but I did nothing with it and wouldn’t have done anything if it wasn’t for the fact that I broke my hip and can’t leave my house for the next three months.

Getting rather bored I ordered a harmonica via the Internet and started practicing.
This time I found that the level of skill you can reach not only depends on your talent. It’s also depended on the kind of information you can get.
Thanks to the instructional videos I found I figured out how to blow a single note. And although I can only blow single notes for about 10 minutes it’s clear that I’ll get better with more practice.

But that’s the harmonica. An instrument that is played by hardly anyone in the Netherlands. And since hardly anyone plays it you can’t get much information on the instrument. But there are loads of people who draw. There are loads of good books on the subject and I have been researching the web since I started.
So does my lack of progress with drawing mean that I don’t have what it takes or is there something else I should take into consideration.
If I’d ask this question a week ago I would have answered that I suffer from a lack of talent. But this week I started with something I’ve never done before. I started with copying the work of other artists.
In doing so I figured something out.

Until now I’ve always tried to draw the pictures in my mind. Since that is the purpose of of this blog I never thought anything of it. Actually the only reason why I started with copying was because I ran out of subjects to draw but still wanted to draw something. Anything.
But in doing so I found that I had to push my self to get better results.
When I draw a picture from memory I’m the only one who know how the original picture looks. And since to me photographs, painting and drawing always look different from each other I’m easily satisfied.
But now everybody is going to get to see both the original painting and my copy of it.
I can no longer put up with the fact that there are hues missing in my drawing box. I can’t get away with adapting the drawing to my drawing box. I have to mix new colors to adapt my drawing box to the picture.

So in doing this drawing I’m learning more then I’ve learned in the last one and a half year.

I think that’s also the reason why my mother never got any better. Yes she did practice for 20,000 hours, but most of that time was spent repeating tunes she already knew by heart. She hardly ever tried new tunes.
By contrast. I’m finding that when I stretch myself and try something new I also get to practice the old skills.

If you want to be an expert at a skill you’ll need three things.

You need the right kind of information.
If you don’t understand what you’re supposed to do, find an other book, website or teacher.
You need to practice 7 to 14 hours a week. Which means that you really need to love this. Otherwise you can get good but you’ll never be an expert.
You need to stretch yourself. Spent the majority of your time practicing new things.
It is important to practice the skills you already know. But to become an expert you’ll have to try and learn everything there is.

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Knowledge versus skills (Sketch: Tree)

by Henk ter Heide on Monday September 24, 2007

Or why having a photographic memory seems to be a disadvantage when you’re learning how to draw.

Over the last two years I’ve learned how to play poker. I won’t say that I’m the worlds best poker player but I can hold my own in free games.

Two years ago I saw something about poker sites on the telly. I’ve always been very bad in card game. But I was curious as to how poker would be played on line. I went to have a look and it turned out to be very easy… to join the game.

At first I had no idea of what I was doing. But I only had to push a few buttons and the software took care of the rest.
After a few days I found that I actually won some times. Most of the time I lost but sometimes I won.

My interest was peeked and I used the information on the poker site to find out what the rules of the game where. What card combinations would give me a fair change of winning and which card combinations always lost. After that I won some more. Or maybe I should say I lost less.

Over the last year my skills improved and my winnings improved until they topped off a few months ago.
I could go on improving my skills. But I would have to study and play a lot. I’m choosing to spend more time drawing and blogging.

The point is that I started with no expectations. When I found that this was something that I could do I improved my knowledge.
From having more knowledge and spending a lot of time at it, I gained skills and my game improved.

With drawing it’s a completely different story. Because of my photographic memory I know everything there is to know about drawing. For every picture I want to draw ten or twenty paintings, photographs and drawings pop into my mind before I’ve even sat down.
And since I can see these pictures in my mind I expected that it would be very easy to draw them. It isn’t. I don’t have the skills.

I’m finding that getting skills doesn’t work the same for me as what I see in other people (children).
Children usually start out with a very simple picture and add stuff until it looks like something. Since they don’t have any expectations of the end result anything goes.

I’ve tried that but for some reason it doesn’t work.
Could be because of all the pictures in my mind. Could be that there is some other reason. I’ll just have to figure it out.

For now. Here are the trees I’ve been promising.
They don’t look like the picture in my mind. Which means that I’m not sure whether I should be proud that I’ve put something on paper. Or that I should be disappointed because of the lack of quality of the drawing.

Tree 7

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Separate the man from the boys (Study: Cars)

by Henk ter Heide on Monday September 17, 2007

Struggle

In the Netherlands we have a writer who is “world famous in the Netherlands” called Maarten ‘t Hart. I’ve never read any of his books (except for the one I had to read for school) but I’ve seen him quite often on television. In the eighties and nineties he was a sought after guest on several Dutch shows were he talked about the struggles of being an artist.
(At the end of the nineties he started wearing drag and people lost interest )

I never quite got the struggle part. Why would artist need to struggle?
It’s not just Maarten ‘t Hart. I’ve often read about the struggle of artists. Writers seem to struggle a lot. Painters also do, but to a lesser extance.
Preforming artist don’t struggle as much. Or at least so it seems.

I’ve been drawing and writing for this blog for close to seven month now and although I hit a few bumps it wasn’t a struggle.
Actually for the most part it was a lot of fun.
I’ve made a lot of sketches and a few times I hit it lucky and produced drawings that were truly beautiful.
With some of the drawing I wanted to make I found that I couldn’t because I didn’t have the skills or didn’t know the techniques. But I’ve never had the feeling that the well was running dry.

Now I do.

Luckily I’m writing for a blog. I don’t jet have that many regular readers. (I guestimate that there are about 23 or 24 of you.) (Plus a few hundred one time visitors a day.) But there are people who seem to think that it is a nice distraction or maybe even something they can learn from.
So I can’t just stop blogging. And since my blog is about drawing I can’t just stop drawing.

Lately I’ve been reading a bit about the art of writing. One of the things that struck me is that every writers tells the same story:
There isn’t such a thing is good writing.
Good writing is a result of bad writing plus good editing.

It took me a while to realize that’s also true for drawing.
To make a beautiful drawing you need a good idea and alot of skill. Then you work.

But I’ve found that even more important than work is you confidence in your ability to draw the picture or write the story.

The struggle begins when you start to doubt your ability to draw your pictures. The moment where you realize that the skills you have aren’t enough to draw the pictures you want to draw.

The struggle begins the moment that you realize that it isn’t the well that is running dry but your self confidence.

The struggle begins the moment you decide that trying to draw your pictures is more important then knowing that you can.

Cars

There are a few autism savants who can draw complete cities from memory. Since I have a photographic memory I expected that I could do something like that. But I couldn’t.

Now I’ve been drawing for a while I’ve realized a few things.
Savants only draw buildings where I want to draw trees and animal and people.
When using ink, the drawing has a lot of straight line and right angles. Just like buildings have. But trees, animal and people dont have straight lines and right angles. Which means that the drawing won’t look like the real thing.

An other problem I’ve found is that the strength of my memory varies with my feelings. When I’m feeling happy and confident I remember a lot more then when I’m scared.

Drawing from memory is something that is very important to me. If I can’t find a way to do that, it will be that much more difficult to draw the pictures in my mind.
Since people, animal and trees are very complicated subjects I’m starting with trying to draw cars.
Here goes nothing…

Cars 1

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I’m trying to draw cars the way I see them. Which means from strange angles because I see them as a cyclist from the site of the road looking down over the cars. That leads to all sorts of problems with perspective.

I’m not sure whether I should study perspective or try to get a clearer picture in my mind.

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