Practice doesn’t make Perfect
I’m going to make this story quick. Basically, I babysit this 9-year old who lives across the street. This time, she had a friend over. We goofed around for a while, they ate dinner, time passed, yada yada. Anyways, the two girls were discussing something, and I was getting a bit bored, so I pulled out my drawing folder and started getting ready to finish one of my sketches. I had barely picked a pencil and found the sketch before the friend was looking over my shoulder.
The next hour turned into a conversation about drawing, during which the friend revealed that she used to draw quite a bit, and thought she was the best in her class. Apparently at some point she discovered someone else could draw better, and she quit. I was (pretty obviously) concerned about that, but before I could try and encourage her to pick up drawing again, she then launched into a story about how her younger sibling had a very similar reaction when he saw her art. And so she’d had to encourage him that, no, you’ll get better with practice. She’d already learned the lesson I was prepared to teach.
We talked about how she should get back into drawing, and so I pulled out some of my blank sheets, and we started comparing notes on drawing. We chose cats as our subject of art, and I learned that a) she draws the cutest cat faces, and b) I have been drawing cat noses upside down this entire time.
Everyone has something to learn.
And we’ll never be perfect.
We can’t compare ourselves to others.
But we can compare ourselves with our past selves, and constantly strive to become better.
