Every damn day isn’t good enough.

Cliff Miller
Jul 10, 2017 · 4 min read

Showing up every day isn’t enough. Not even close.

Lots of people write articles on medium about how you need to show up every day to improve. If you want to be a good writer, write every day. If you want to be a good artist, create every day.

While that’s peachy, at best it’s a necessary but not sufficient condition to improvement.

You can go a long time, maybe your whole life, creating garbage every day. I’m sure it happens more than we even know.

By itself it’s just a habit. Habits are critical but simply doing it every day won’t get you anywhere without an active learning strategy along with it.

If you’re reading this, you probably really want to get better at whatever you do.

There is no magic one-size-fits-all solution. But there is a fairly universal toolbox. The brain works pretty much the same for everyone. And every year we understand it more and more.

Do yourself a favor and really learn about learning. Reading motivational articles on Medium is fun but I rarely see anything with much rigor, my writing included.

Read resources backed by research and try to understand it deeply. Surface level material doesn’t help you build deep understanding. Your toolbox is complex.

Here are five books I’d recommend to literally anyone who gives a shit about getting better:

Building daily habits for practice is great but you need to learn how to make those habits work for you.

I’ve been drawing and painting every day for the past several months. I’m still pretty bad, but I have made drastic improvements. I’m also working on writing, photography, and video production.

Here is an overview of my learning tactics in no particular order:

  1. Do it every damn day. Daily habits are great. You can probably get away with less than this but daily habits seem to be stronger than other habits.
  2. Mix it up. Your brain is built on mental models that approximate reality. The more angles you approach your subject from the better your brain understands it. For example, I might do figure drawing, then some perspective drawing, then some doodles.
  3. Write and talk about it. Your brain is forgetful by design. The more you access your knowledge and the deeper that access is the stronger your knowledge gets.
  4. Connect it. Similar to mixing it up but going futher. Connect your subject to other subjects (e.g. drawing and photography, writing and cinematography). This gives you better mental models and abstraction of the subject.
  5. Expand your learning. Seek out experts and learn from them. Buy books on the subject. Watch YouTube videos about it. Do some courses.
  6. Reflect on it. Find some time to think about what you’re doing. Think about high level things and low level things. I generally reflect in my morning shower and when doing less active drawing like doodling.
  7. Save observations. The brain is very forgetful. I forget what I was doing 5 minutes ago more than I care to admit. If you have an interesting thought, write that shit down.
  8. Take breaks and leave work unfinished. The brain likes to crack a problem. It does a lot of stuff without you being concious of it. By letting it work on a problem in the background you may find your thoughts are stronger when you come back to your work. I tend to write some thoughts down in the evening then write something more complete the next morning.
  9. Identify and face fears. Your fears tend to come from lack of skill or knowledge. By facing them directly you’re often facing gaps in your development that you might not have been aware of.
  10. Do reality checks and get feedback. It’s easy to end up off-course. Find ways to check your progress. Ask for feedback. Put your work on the internet and see what people think. Pay for this if you have to because it’s very important.

Finally, you need to fail a lot. The brain hates failure. It’s a problem the brain wants to solve. By feeding your brain failure and ideas for solutions you can get pretty far.

Failure by flying too high is the best failure.

Real self-development is an emotional gauntlet of rejection and failure. It’s constant pain and it’s easy to want to avoid. But getting through that pain is very rewarding.

I hope this helps you.

The Ascent

A community of storytellers documenting the journey to happiness & fulfillment.

Cliff Miller

Written by

Stay-at-home father exploring learning and sharing. More at http://theuntrainedi.com. Follow me at @_cliffkm_.

The Ascent

A community of storytellers documenting the journey to happiness & fulfillment.

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