Before starting to work on the perspective chapter I decided to spend a couple days fact-checking my outline of it. I thought that this research would help me avoid doing more work in the future. The more research I did, the more information I realized I had to pack into the chapter to actually make it useful.
A week later I finally settled on a good outline and made a first draft of the chapter and around 6 diagrams for it. This took me a couple hours in total to do. I was initially quite happy with the result. But there were still some things I wasn’t confident about.
So I went back to doing research. The more research I did, the more I realized I had to redo all those diagrams.
So I redid the diagrams and made a couple more.
Then I found a 300-page book about perspective. After reading a couple of its first chapters, I realized that my book contains factual mistakes and now I need to redo most of the diagrams and text that I’ve written, both for this and previous chapters. So I quit working on the book for around a month, only briefly opening the file a couple times.
I wasn’t afraid of failure, I just didn’t want to feel the frustration and pain of redoing the same thing all over again.
Research doesn’t build the skill
It only gives you a set of rules you can repeat and sound like you know something. That’s called declarative knowledge, knowing a fact and being able to say it. Being able to actually do something is a separate thing, called procedural knowledge. Knowing a rule well enough to explain it doesn’t mean you can execute it flawlessly.
Every round of research made my outline more accurate in theory, but that’s just the map. The real territory is when I open InDesign and create the actual layout, write the text that has to concisely and effectively explain the topic, and draw the diagrams. Even if I read the full 300 page book and memorized all of it, I would’ve never been able to write the chapter perfectly first try. For one, the chapter is only 6 pages long, I can’t possibly fit all the information in there.
Redoing is part of the process
I kept feeling like each redo was more proof that I haven’t prepared enough, which sent me straight back to research again. It felt like redoing a diagram was somehow not part of the process and that it was a waste of time.
The same loop happened when I felt like I was bad at some aspect of drawing, so I obsessively watched courses and tutorials about it until I felt like I was closer to the truth. And when I got back to drawing with my newfound confidence, each time I realized that I hadn’t actually learned anything. Learning means changing your behavior, but I didn’t practice any of the new behavior.
So the only way to break this loop is to make the first draft, do the assignments you get in courses or force yourself to follow along with a tutorial even if it doesn’t give you any homework.
That’s the only way to get procedural knowledge, and it’s what actually matters for your skill.
