Comment Re:The average person thinks they've above average (Score 1) 220
Oh it's hard work alright, you don't get away that easy; but you can drag a rock up a hill, or you can put it on wheels and tow it. If you tow it, you're still going to expend a lot of effort and build a lot of muscle, but you're also going to move a shitload more rocks on the way.
Ericsson's studies point to deliberate practice: rather than simply exercising a skill, you have to deliberately exercise technical skills. Practice must be technical-goal-oriented and provide constant and immediate feedback; you can't just sit down and repeatedly play songs, draw pictures, or write programs and expect to get much better.
Think about body builders. If you just sat down and lifted weights, 30 pound weights giving 30 repetitions in 5 sets per day, would you get any stronger? Yes, a little; but not nearly as much as if you set goals to increase the repetitions, to add more weight, and so forth. You'll work somewhat harder at it that way, but you'll invest much less time becoming much stronger than the guy who just shows up to do the same routine every day.
The same goes for all skills. If you want to draw better, you must examine your drawings and look for your mistakes, and then identify why they are mistakes, and specifically work on that skill en masse instead of drawing things that incorporate that skill. Drawing scenes with people, and your anatomy sucks? Don't just draw more scenes with two or three people; you'll just waste 15 hours drawing a scene in which you spend 90 minutes drawing people. Sit down and draw people, again and again, for 15 hours instead. The face is wrong? Focus on the face; hell, just draw faces. Something in the gait, the way the legs are done? Do hasty sketches of the upper bodies, and work entirely on the lower body detail work, then draw new people. All the while, examine your work, cross-reference any technical documentation or reference material you have, look for deviations from what you would consider perfect, and make those corrections.
A pianter friend of mine once remarked that he had trouble with darker tones. Once you've used a darker tone, it's hard to lighten up; and placing darker tones in a scene is difficult from an artistic perspective, in the same way selecting any pallet is difficult. He could never use darker tones appropriately. One day, he decided he'd sit down and start painting rough scenes, incorporating darker tones intentionally, and focusing most of his effort on using dark tones effectively. Every time he painted a scene, he put the majority of attention on his use of dark tones, on how he would use them; he cast out his acquired artistic instincts and focused his analytic mind on his actions, used all of his artistic knowledge and applied it to the effort at hand.
This painter made note of what did and didn't work well, of what mistakes he made, and of where his blunders were of obvious technical failure--why they didn't work well--until those blunders started to go away and his pallet utilization became more effective. Now he is a much better painter, able to paint scenes of all types, because he spent a short time and a concentrated effort on correcting a single technical skill, instead of just painting complete works and trying to incorporate dark tones into them. A problem which would have taken years to improve on by sheer bulk experience was corrected in weeks by deliberate practice.
It is said in some industries that a man who works in an unchanging environment using the same tools to solve a variety of problems in the same way for 20 years does not have 20 years of experience; he has 1 year of experience 20 times. This statement is nonsense when you discount the value of experience, and at the same time it itself discounts the value of experience by example.