Raising the Bottom Bar

An instal­la­tion of Kevin Burkhal­ter’s Jour­nal Com­ic from the end of last year pro­vides an inter­est­ing twist on the idea that con­stant prac­tice is more impor­tant than any oth­er aspect of cre­ative work:

http://kevinsjournalcomic.com/comic12‑4 – 2008.html

There are a lot of ways to express this which encom­pass a vari­ety of iter­a­tions and corol­lar­ies. Mal­colm Glad­well’s 10,000 hours to mas­tery, Kevin Burkhal­ter’s rais­ing of the low­er bar, and my old art skool instruc­tor who said, «Every­one’s got a cer­tain num­ber of bad draw­ings in them. Your job is to get them out onto paper as fast as you can.» It all comes down to: keep doing it and nev­er be afraid to make bad work.

One of my biggest prob­lems is that I’m always afraid to make bad work. I don’t know how far into my 10,000 hours I am and I don’t know if there’s any way of guess­ing. I’ve nev­er devel­oped the abil­i­ty to draw as a sec­ond nature. I go a lit­tle crazy when I go too long with­out draw­ing, which is how I know that putting lines on paper is what I’m sup­posed to do, but I still sec­ond-guess myself at every stage and it makes my work slow­er and prob­a­bly gets in the way of mak­ing my best work.

I’m cer­tain I’ve spent a good deal more than 10,000 hours pro­gram­ming, but that’s a total­ly dif­fer­ent kind of thing. Soft­ware devel­op­ment skills are, for the most part, expir­ing assets. Think about it: 10,000 hours is five years of 40 hour weeks. So if you want to hire some­one who is a mas­ter of a par­tic­u­lar tech­nol­o­gy, you have to find some­one who has worked in that tech­nol­o­gy exclu­sive­ly for the last five years. Show me a web devel­op­ment tech­nol­o­gy that is in demand that is old­er than five years old. Yes, there are some, but do you want peo­ple that don’t have oth­er skills (and cur­rent ones) as well?

This is why I have to keep putting pen onto paper. Being able to see objects in space and trans­late them into lines on paper is not a skill that will expire. The art and illus­tra­tion mar­kets will change over time, and we’re see­ing some dra­mat­ic changes now, but ulti­mate­ly pic­tures made of lines will not go away in my life­time. The web­site devel­op­ment skills I have today might be worth six fig­ures, but in ten years these same skills won’t be worth min­i­mum wage. If you were look­ing at buy­ing stocks, one with a grad­ual but steady increase and the oth­er with steady deval­u­a­tion punc­tu­at­ed by occa­sion­al and unpre­dictable rapid esca­la­tion result­ing thus far in over­all gains, which one would you be more com­fort­able putting your sav­ings into?