Day 279: Fruity

personal

When I was looking through my journal entries from 2017 to prepare my talk for Kapwing, I came across this post:

June 24, 2017

An idea that I’m really excited about is developing creative skills using systematic practice. Basically, learning to learn better and using deliberate practice to improve my abilities in different domains. This is inspired in part by the Month to Mastery project that Max Deutsch is doing. I can imagine spending an hour or two every day trying to improve some skill. Maybe I would devote 100 days to each task. Here are a few that come to mind:

  • Drawing

    • this could either be making a new drawing every day or going through some online class like Max did with his portrait work. the important bit is creating an artifact every day to measure progress and keep on practicing

  • Singing

  • Rapping

    • Singing and rapping appeal to me because it will help me work on memorizing words better. I’m not very good at memorizing lyrics, and having a daily challenge that forces me to memorize a song every day would (hopefully) make me better at memorizing things

  • Freestyle rapping

  • Guitar

  • Piano

  • Beatboxing

  • Learning a song by ear

  • Drawing a comic

Man, maybe the right move is to do 3x/week for videos and then spend a lot of my other time working on a 100 days challenge for each of these different things? I’m so excited about all the different things I can spend my time on. But let’s do one thing at a time. Start with videos, make it successful, then consider doing these other things. First things first!

I got excited about the idea of systematic practice again a little over a year ago when I started my One Year Challenge of improving at playing guitar and singing. But disaster struck within first five weeks when I got sucked into building tools for practicing and this happened:

I rediscovered my love for coding and that means I’m no better at guitar and singing than I was a year ago.

Even though I’ve quite enjoyed coding and building products over the past year, I still have the aspiration of developing my skills in music and drawing more. Unfortunately, it seems that I’m wired to only able to focus on one thing at a time — in 2017 that was making videos, then it was meditating and going on retreats, and now it’s coding and building products. Is it possible to open up my one-track mind to be able to work on multiple things at once? I’d love to be able to consistently work on improving at drawing/design while at the same time building products, but at this point, it’s honestly a mystery to me how I can avoid the failure mode that I’ve encountered again and again of dropping everything but one thing.

For some reason, I’ve been able to keep other commitments fairly easily, like writing here. I’ve done this consistently for over 9 months now without missing a day, but maybe this isn’t comparable — this is more of me thinking out loud and exploring things rather than systematically practicing a craft. (I’d like to get better at writing as well, but I’m not using Road to Ramen for that purpose.)

A few weeks ago, I ordered an iPad because I was feeling inspired again and thought maybe I’d have an easier time creating if I changed up the medium. It’s highly likely that I’m being overly optimistic (read: delusional) and nothing of the sort will happen, but hey, a man can hope. The iPad arrived today, and I did a Procreate tutorial (amazing software, btw) and produced this magnificent work of art:

I’m reluctant to commit to something like “produce one drawing a day” right now because I don’t want to start if I’m not willing to prioritize it and really do my best to follow through, but I’d like to play around with this more to draw more. I’d be stoked if this led to me incorporating more drawings and visuals into Road to Ramen because things are more fun and spicy that way.

Here’s to hoping the iPad doesn’t end up sitting around collecting dust after a few weeks.