We like to give all the credit to natural talent. It helps us sleep better at night. Take, for example, my brother and I: he's an incredible illustrator, while I can hardly draw rectangles. Growing up I attributed his success to a natural aptitude for drawing, but that's a load of bologna. I played with Matchbox cars 10 hours a week, he drew superheroes. No wonder he's a better artist.
I designed my first logo at age seven for a company that didn’t exist. Three years later, I had graduated to designing websites in my underwear for Internet friends I would never meet. Fast forward twelve years and I’m still designing websites, only now I wear pants and the companies are 100% real.
Back in the day, I designed because none of my other friends were designing. (They were outside pretending to be astronauts or whatever it is ten year olds are supposed to do.) I didn’t call it designing then, obviously, as the word has too many letters and too ambiguous a definition for a ten year old in his underpants. I didn’t call it anything—I was simply having fun on the computer.
I’ve been having fun on the computer for a while now. I'd say I’ve spent more than 9,000 hours fooling around. That’s a long time. If I’d have spent 9,000 hours practicing the drums like my mother insisted, I’d be one hell of a drummer.
People very often tell me that I’ve got the design gift: that I’m naturally talented at whatever it is that makes a good designer. I disagree. I’m not naturally talented at anything, except maybe creating awkwardness at inopportune moments. I’ve simply trained for more than two thirds my life to be a designer. I had fun designing and, as a result, I did it all the time, slowly practicing the skills necessary to make things beautifully useful. No gifts. No talents. Just a lot of practice.
Find something you enjoy and do it. A lot. And then do it some more. Michael Jordan always said, “Just play. Have fun. Enjoy the game.” If only my game paid as much as his.
5 Comments
on August 19, 2009 at 09:39am
Great article - I agree completely. In fact, I still remember 10-year-old Jonathan and his websites. Your brother still draws the occasional superhero.
Congratulations on your position at HUGE - a very well-deserved achievement.
on August 19, 2009 at 12:33pm
A well put point, but one that does not necessarily apply universally. One can find as many instances of nature defining individual capability as nurture creating it, and the tendency one way or the other varies significantly on the skill being discussed. However in terms of more conceptual skills such as design, I would agree that the nurture is more important than natural talent.
To elaborate, this does not necessarily apply to people who are not specialized in a specific “skill”, or at least one that is concrete in what it takes to nurture and practice. For example someone starting a company for the first time may have no experience in the specific skill of “company starting”, but through the random and diverse experiences they have had in life so far, they are quite good at organizing people and managing the projects involved. In such a case it isn’t as easy to connect the development of social skills and logical break down of tasks to specific “practice”. Rather it is the diversity and range of experience (in a sense almost a lack of specific practice) which provides the skill in this case.
I am just playing devil’s advocate here. On the whole I agree with your point, but I wouldn’t judge every skill by the amount of practice behind it. A jack-of-all-trades may not be a master at any single one, but will be far more capable at integrating multiple fields of interest than someone who has mastered a more specific skill-set.
Keep up the blog entries, you write well and the site design is very pleasing to the eye. Makes me want to work harder on mine.
on August 19, 2009 at 01:48pm
Yeah I think this true, and applies pretty widely. I think exactly the same thing about acting. People often talk about talented actors, but really talent is the smallest fraction of a good performance.
The flip-side of the coin is that people who teach themselves a skill and don’t have a means for feedback often end up cultivating bad habits, and I think that’s where formal education can play a huge part. I know many people who have been coding HTML for as long or longer than you who still don’t understand basic concepts of design, because they haven’t critically evaluated their own work, or had it evaluated by others. They can’t correct their mistakes, because they don’t know they’re doing anything wrong.
on August 20, 2009 at 08:17pm
Well, what is the specific design skill? Isn’t good design the culmination of many different skills? I would even argue that we don’t have names for many of the skills that contribute to being a good designer.
on August 20, 2009 at 08:43pm
This is true. An entrepreneur is essentially designing a company, and I suppose they will be better at it after a few attempts (unless the first one makes it big, then they don’t have to worry).
It will be interesting to see what happens to “skill” and “talent” when computers get increasingly better at emulating creativity (or actually being creative as I think will happen).