Last week I decided I want to learn a new skill, and because I can't make myself spend a few hours a day coding (yet, but I will at some point in the very near future), I decided to start with something a little "easier" - drawing.
When I say "easier" I don't mean that drawing and being a really great artist is an easy thing. Not at all. I'm aware of all the work those people need to put in to come up with... well, pretty much anything.
By "easy" I mean that in order to draw, or better said, in order to start drawing all you need is a pen and a piece of paper. You don't need to install anything, you don't need to search for a bunch of tutorials or courses and you don't need to learn something specific in order to just start.
You can just grab an agenda or a notebook, get a pen and start drawing, either something from your own imagination or just copy the work of other artists to see how close you can get to what they did.
Right now I'm at a level that can be described as being between "What the hell is that?" and "Don't ever do it again, please." The only reason I'm still doing it is because it's a known fact that unless you have a natural talent, it's gonna be hard to learn how to do something at first and for a period of time you'll only create crap.
I don't really know anything about drawing except that you need a lot of practice to get good at it. I don't know any body anatomy, I don't know anything about shadows, how certain things should look like or even how to properly draw a line.
But I'm okay with that because I know that's how it should be. I did not invest a lot of effort into drawing so it's natural to be bad at it, just like it's natural to be bad at coding if you never tried to learn how to properly code in the past, or a bad driver if you've never really drove any car.
What really matters is to keep creating crap no matter how discouraging that may be. I mean, I don't feel proud of what I draw every single day and I'm sure I won't be in the near future - but one day I will come up with something decent and I'll be happy about it.
I don't know when it will happen and it probably won't be soon. I still have a lot to learn and practice. But I will get something right at least once, and all that will be because of all the crap I created in the past.
Not being good at something doesn't mean you won't be able to learn how to be good. It just means you lack all the practice you need. Once you invest some time into one activity and allow yourself to create crap, you will, little by little, get better and create good things.
I actually like your idea, keep it up. :)
Thank you :)
Great ideas on how to stay positive and move forward in your development. What programming language(s) are you looking into? I also re-steemed your post. Very good stuff.
Thank you very much!
And I don't really know yet, I can't decide.
I started a long time ago with JavaScript, and as much as I like the idea of being able to create amazing websites and work with web browsers, I don't like having to learn multiple other tools (like html and css for example) in order to be able to fully use JavaScript.
I'm not saying it's wrong, I just don't like it because I'd rather focus on the programming language itself and see how it works rather than having to constantly learn other things in order to make that language run correctly.
Then I learned some Python and while I like the simplicity of the syntax, I didn't really feel like I was gonna create anything interesting soon. I learned the basics and a few more... "advanced" things and I was able to build really small text-based games, but nothing more.
I may come back to Python once I find a language that I can learn and work on fun projects with.
Around a month ago I downloaded Unity and tried to understand how games are made, and I had to use some C# code to make something with the software.
I don't really know anything about C# but I may be interested in learning it since I can directly use it into Unity and create something fast without having to spend entire weeks or even months learning before being able to come up with something.
But I don't really know yet, I still have to decide and do more research on the topic.
Seems like you have a few languages in mind. Good luck with your research. Let me know if I can help in any way. I've worked with all the languages you're interested in.
Thank you, I almost got discouraged after posting my first article here on Steemit. When I read it I felt it's not really written well and that it sucks. But your post made me realize that with writing it's the same thing. I should just keep writing and some day it will be quite good :-))
That's right, there's nothing wrong with your first article being bad if you never wrote before. It happens to all of us (I don't even want to remember my first article), and you can only improve in time. Keep working and don't give up :)