Recently, it struck me how much easier painting has become. Of course, working at something over many years consistently would have that as a by product. Yet, I think this is something often taken for granted.

This applies to so many things in my life, such as combining singing and playing piano, or even just learning piano and singing on their own. It also applies to my job. I work as a software engineer and in the beginning, the job just seemed soooo difficult. Navigating a code base with hundreds of thousands of lines of code seemed impossible, like where do you even start?! From a beginner point like that, it’s not possible to make an accurate prediction of whether you can succeed. You just don’t have enough information. You literally cannot process everything in the beginning of a complex endeavor. This is what I think is so magical about learning something.

I can see this so clearly with drawing as well. 20 years ago, I took a portrait drawing class with my sister and my creations were an abomination. And I remember feeling so frustrated at the time! It was as if I couldn’t see all the details of the face. I would always miss something critical. Every time I’d finish a drawing, I’d see something else I missed or sometimes I couldn’t even tell why it was off, but I knew it was. Besides the proportions, so many of the techniques seemed a mystery to me. How on earth was it even possible to translate reality realistically onto a sheet of paper? It was like magic, incomprehensible. My mind was not at a point where I could process all the complexities of the human face and put that on paper. I just wasn’t able to do it yet and it’s a very difficult thing to do after all. Now I see that this is totally normal. You’d be insane to expect even halfway decent results at the beginning. It’s just the ego trying to trick you into the delusion that if something isn’t easy, you should just give up.

The point is this: I could have stopped trying 20 years ago and thought ‘this is it’. I could have stayed at the same job, stayed in the same state, not tried anything new. How boring would that have been though? I’m so glad I pushed myself. Inevitably when you do, you end up becoming so much more than you ever thought you could.