Do what you can't

“I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it.”

― Vincent Van Gogh

The Painter in His Workshop (Adriaen van Ostade, 1663)

I don’t believe in needing experience before doing something.

For the longest time, I thought I had to understand something in order to do it.

But when I realized I can just do things, when I decided to stop waiting for permission or instruction or advice, and simply began fumbling my way through the things I had always wanted to do, was a moment of maturity.

The more I did, the less tired I felt. The more hard things I attempted, even if I failed, the more my competence and confidence grew. Agency became a form of aliveness.

Idleness is almost always a mistake. Waiting is not only debilitating and demoralizing, but also exhausting. When Hesiod said, "Hunger is the natural companion of the utterly idle man," prosaically he meant literal hunger, but poetically he was pointing toward this immense dissatisfaction with life. This sentiment of aggravated emptiness that arises from being a passive participant, instead of an engaged actor. "Immense dissatisfaction is the natural companion of the utterly idle man."

When I decided to learn photography in 2023, I did what most do. I searched up video tutorials, scoured facebook marketplace for cameras, saved countless "intro to photography" articles to "read later". But rather than feeling delighted by the abundance of accessible information, there was only a sinking sense of dread. I was paralyzed, like a deer in semi-truck headlights. Paralyzed by my ignorance.

As I began down the soft and supple slope of demotivation, inches from scrapping the whole endeavor, I made a radical, almost reckless, decision. I decided to scrap all the information. I decided I would teach myself. The gritty but gleeful, tried and true, hard way¹.

Instead of watching hours of instructional videos, I watched one 6-minute clip on the basics of ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. Instead of buying a $1,000 camera, I bought a $10 memory card and borrowed a friend's Canon DSLR he hadn't used in years². Instead of reading everything, I read nothing. I got my camera and got outside. I committed to taking at least a photo a day and regularly sharing the results.

Instead of learning being laborious and dull, like school insists, it was a joy. I had the autonomy to try and the freedom to fail. It became a personal, private project, with all the excitement of secrecy and all the nobility of ownership.

Now, I'm a year and a half into taking a photo every day (except on the days I forget). I'm no professional but I have taken a few photos I cherish.

There's a joy in this relaxed pace of progress, this patience. It's like being a child, careless and sunny, simply and instinctively at play. There's a beauty in the earnest attempt of the amateur, the striving, despite not knowing what he's doing. I admire it deeply.

Eventually, I began to browse through photography online, training my taste for what makes a good photo, getting curious about why I like certain images and not others. And I did buy two photography books, written in the 80s, for $1 each from a used bookstore (run by a few lovely old ladies)³. But the knowledge was added only after I had a basic embodied understanding. I could seek out specific answers to specific questions, and immediately implement anything useful. By starting with doing, I already had a framework, a tree trunk and big branches, that I could hang new knowledge on, rather than pile it all in my arms till I topple over.

This winter, when I decided to learn woodcarving, I stuck to the same process. I just picked up a block of wood from the fireplace and a knife from my drawer and tried to make something that looked like a spoon. First, I made a long soup spoon, then a coffee spoon, then a teaspoon. Each was imperfect, but in its own unique way. For most of my life, I thought I was useless at working with my hands. I thought it was incompetence when it was really impatience.

It's something like an attitude of healthy skepticism I'm suggesting. Investigating whether things are really as hard as they look. Usually, they aren't. Many things look super hard, prove to be quite easy. But to discover that, an attempt must be made. Effort must come before success.

Information abundance is a modern miracle but it's also an impediment to agency. And it happens to be much more fun and freeing to be out in the world just doing stuff, stumping around and humming merrily, expanding my zone of competence, than sitting inside on a screen watching someone else do stuff. Knowledge is rarely the bottleneck. To start almost anything, you need to know nearly nothing.

The world is full of lovely rewards for little effort. Of course, becoming a master craftsman takes decades of diligence. But being a bumbling apprentice who can build useful things takes no time at all. I think practicing a skill for three or four hours a week, for three or four months, can put you in the top quartile of that skill. Most people aren't trying that hard. Or trying at all.

Learning is downstream of doing. The order should rarely be reversed. Most real knowledge, knowledge worth attaining, lives in the hands. It must be cultivated gradually, like a garden. Really, it must be grown. Most real knowledge is the result of doing something deliberately for a long time and steadily making small improvements. It requires a stubborn, almost silly, amount of trial and error and repetition, all as a form of love. Even wisdom lives "in the hands" because it is a product of pain, not instruction.

A skeptic would retort that I don't know what I'm talking about, since I'm an amateur photographer and clumsy woodcarver. But, I'd argue, an expert would emphasize learning by doing just as emphatically, if not more.

I'm not a writing expert but it is my strongest skill, that I've spent thousands of hours honing.

The other day, a friend asked for advice to become a better writer. As a rule, I don't like to give general advice. I don't think it generalizes well. But I shared what I would tell myself four years ago when I began to write online:

"You get better at writing by writing. Show up to the keyboard every day and write a lot of words (aim for 1,000) and keep doing it and keep caring and you'll get better. Be willing to suck for a long time. Commit to the difficulty. Commit to a decade of obscurity. Fall in love with the unsexiness of the long haul. Success is mostly doing something well for a long time before anybody cares."

I know it sounds boring and hard but it's my best advice. There are no shortcuts. Short cuts only make long delays⁴. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably trying to sell you something. There seems to be a strange but sickening modern thrust to get the average person to stop thinking.

A distant second, only after you've established a recurring writing practice, is to seek out and read great writing. Your kind of great writing. Writing you can't get enough of. Writing that sticks to your bones like warm soup on a cold day. Be curious and playful about why you love it so much, what makes each word so whimsical. Read it and reread it and reread it again. Copy out the sentences by hand. Imitate the style until you become dissatisfied, then innovate on their work. Much later, you can read "how to" writing books, but only if you have time to kill.

If you've noticed, we've developed a pattern for learning. Start by doing. Commit to somewhat consistent and somewhat deliberate practice. Only later, once you've built a foundation on the hard rock of creation, seek out examples of things you love and study them. Maybe add in some theory, but maybe not.

Do what you can't, until you learn that you can.

To be sure, it's the more difficult way. It's easier to lie in bed on YouTube or skim and scan how-to guides or outsource the nuance of thought to a computer. But the difficulty is why I trust it.

Make something beautiful today,

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1. The paradox here is that the hard way is actually the easy way.

2. In the first few months, 90% of my photos were taken on my iPhone. Even now, it’s still ~50% since it’s often close at hand.

3. Books, by the way, are often my first resource to learn anything. They're superior to online content because they're comprehensive enough to cover a lot of ground but curated enough to not be overwhelming.

4. Paraphrasing Tolkien here.