Still working through the Goldman book, which has the inspirational quote: “I hope you wear this book out from overuse!” And that’s what you need when you’re practicing!
-the Centaur
P.S. My wife and I were talking about learning skills, and she complained that she hadn’t quite gotten what she wanted to out of a recent set of books. It occurred to me that there are two situations in which reading books about a skill doesn’t help you:
- It can be you haven’t yet found the right book, course or teacher that breaks it down in the right way (for me in music, for example, it was “Understanding the Fundamentals of Music” which finally helped me understand the harmonic progression, the circle of fifths, and scales, and even then I had to read it twice).
- It can be because you’re not doing enough of the thing to know the right questions to ask, which means you may not recognize the answers when they’re given to you.
Both of these are related to Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development – you can most easily learn things that are related to what you already know. Without a body of practice at a skill, reading up on it can sometimes turn into armchair quarterbacking and doesn’t help you (and can sometimes even hurt you); with a body of practice, it turns into something closer to an athlete watching game footage to improve their own game.
So! Onward with the drawing. Hopefully some of the drawing theory will stick this time.
