The Finish Line

What’s the point of practice if you can’t see progress? Jack Cheng, in his informative post 30 Minutes a Day, has done all the hard work for me, describing my approach to picking up skills in the first lines of the article.

‘If you’re like me, there are times when you get so excited about learning something new that you spend a day or two on it non-stop, only to get tired of it and move on to something else.’

I am like you, Mr. Cheng. Binge learning has left my great-aunt’s banjo-mandolin gathering dust in the corner for the past few months, and tens of mostly full paint tubes hidden deep in my drawers. Mr. Cheng goes on to make an important point about the nature of practice: it’s not how much you do, it’s how often you do it. One popular aphorism does well in summing things up, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’.

A big part of practice is tracking your progress. Without some reference point to where you begin, or where you’d like to be, you’re developing a party-trick. Right now, as a compliment to my graphic design training, I’m working on is my writing. Under the instruction of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, I’ve set myself a daily target of 300 words. My iPhone is tooled up to display a badge with how many days in a row I’ve managed to achieve the 300 word target. The idea being that the number becomes its own motivation, a game of very simple chess against my laziness. Quantity, the ‘how much’, is easy to track, but how do you track growth in quality?

If you’re lucky, you’ll have a body of work at your disposal. It doesn’t need to be a big body by any means, as long as it’s done over a reasonable period of time, 12 months is a good, practical, minimum. The often heart-rending act of looking back into your archives of work is one of the simplest ways to chart your progress, if you can lift yourself to an objective perspective.

It’s tough to remove your own bias, and look at your work in an even-handed way. I’m someone who is prone to being their own worst critic, I’ve come across others who are all to willing to lavish praise on themselves in the name of self-promotion, even if the work isn’t that good.

I recently designed a poster for a touring agency, they were stoked with the result, and given the rushed timeline, so was I. Going back and comparing it with an older poster – the first poster I did for the same agency about three years ago – let me give myself a pat on the back. It showed, strikingly, how far I’ve come.

I remember spending days trying to get that first poster right. It was my first, proper, going-to-be-printed, piece of work. So there was high pressure, and, in the end, even back then, I wasn’t overly satisfied with the results. But I knew I’d worked hard, and that was enough to talk me off the ledge.

Looking at the poster now, I wonder, did I really work hard at all? It looks like I spent all of 15 drunk minutes on it, blindly choosing type, rendering bad illustrations, and generally making it look like someone gave Illustrator to a chimp with hyperactivity, narcolepsy and no sense of aesthetics. It’s been a long, undulating, road from that first beer money poster to the latest beer money poster, and I can see a lot of hills and valleys still to come.

Try as I might, I still wake up most days and wonder if today’s the today I’ll reach the finish line; will this be the day I tear through the ribbon and become a graphic designer, (or maybe even a writer). It’s dawning, albeit incredibly slowly, that there is no finish line, it doesn’t even exist. Unless I want to give up halfway, get a taxi home, eat entire blocks of fruit and nut chocolate, and feel sorry for myself, I just have to put my head down and keep on practicing.