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Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

Keep an open mind. I was horrendous at and didn't enjoy design, kept trying and trying but was still utterly horrid. One day I noticed the work of much more talented people was not better than mine, in fact, it was worse, this was perplexing.

The constant practice which seemed to have no impact had actually made me better. Basic things: tinkering with bootstrap layouts, taking 2 hours to feebly make a mediocre background image, curving edges on an image, tinkering with margins and padding, removing unessential elements. It all added up.

This skill has also helped me in ways I never expected, like being able to put together a nice looking slide deck (~25 slides) in 90 minutes, where previously it would take days.

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I like this comment; and i have a similar thing with "indie music" or "jingle creation"; lots of podcasts and such have the listeners submit music and jingles to go with the theme of the show, and while a couple over the years have been really fascinatingly good, 99% of it is not. I produced and wrote several electronic albums over 16 years, to no fame, fortune, or recognition. I changed my workflows and software almost a half dozen times in that time frame; but the thing that did not change was the passion of creating something new that no one had ever done before.

Now, when someone says something offhand or funny, i can usually bang out a 10-30 second jingle or music clip in a couple hours using rudimentary software (my go to for extreme speed is OpenMPT - https://openmpt.org/), and i think the quality and listen-ability, as well as the fidelity of speech/singing is light-years ahead of whatever the common submissions are.

Now, I'm generally a cantankerous cuss these days online, so even my best stuff doesn't get a lot of play; but 2 decades of being "in the scene" and trying to get plays kinda washed the desire for fame out of me, so i find myself not caring.

If you find yourself looking at other artistic things people have done and the thought "train-wreck" comes to mind - maybe you've learned enough stuff to be able to talk about it legitimately in a critical way?

There's no shame I'm just noodling and jamming. In fact, I find it meditative.

Sometimes just twisting a few knobs on a symthesizer and making a boring four-to-the-floor loop can take you away for a few hours

I echo this, I come from a highly technical background (security) and the 1,000 hours thing is true - I think most people can do most things that have a large group of humans do them if they’re able to find a way to make the time investment and willing to fail a lot as part of the journey.

I’ve built a lot of shitty frontends and done lots of bad design work, but now I like to think while I’m no color theorist or UX expert that I can build products that are intuitive and look good.

A side effect of this is also that it’s seeped into the rest of my life and I now unfortunately spot design faux pas everywhere and laughing about bad font kerning (or “keming” - https://www.reddit.com/r/keming) usually gets me a sideways look from my friends and family lol.

Very cool! I like to characterize practice as exercising your degrees-of-freedom in a domain (your "basic things"). This exploration gives you an intuition about what your future choices will be, allowing your current choices to be made with more confidence, and in greater harmony with your later ones, so things go faster and better. It's certainly a human's greatest superpower.

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