Hacker News Reader

+1. I heard about those theories, so I once did an upside-down drawing as well. As promised, it turned out substantially better than a regular copy of mine. (I thought this was impressive, but I didn't have any real need to learn to draw well, so I left it at that.)

I started like you but pushed the abstract idea further down to reality. I'm not good and my drawings have a mechanical aspect, or at best a crafted/regular organic style. Later I read the Loomis book, which is filled with delicious drawings of human figures, used the same principles. Use abstract references, refine, analyse.

That said, the idea of abstracting away from abstraction/interpretation is a great one that I never considered

    ... well, if I can learn to DRAW, and I was so BAD 
    at drawing initially, I can pretty much learn to do 
    anything.

I used to think like that. If I tried hard and applied myself I could do just about anything...until that sort of thing stopped working. It certainly helped but it won't take you to the stars. It just seemed that no matter how hard I tried, I never got better at what I had in mind.

I think this kind of thinking is helpful but it has its ultimate limits, which seem to be set to 'low' for me.

Well I think most of it is time, the whole 10,000 hours thing.

Since we are talking about drawing take a look at MindCandyMan on conceptart.org (His journey sketchbook http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=870)

Post of an example of how far he has come: http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?p=1789531#po...

His website showcasing his work: http://www.jonathanhardesty.com/paintings.htm

My favorite example of this is Penny Arcade.

First year: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/11/18

Five years later: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/11/18

Drawing at the level of that book isn't a hard problem, as, say, learning organic chemistry. Or is it? some people seem to have a natural ability in some things. In fact, the idea that some children naturally fall into "try harder" vs "this is too hard" camp points to something influenced by biology.

How about creating new solutions to what are considered hard industry problems?

If it takes you 10,000 hours to learn the basics Organic chemistry, can you say you succeeded? That's almost five years learning what most people do in five or ten weeks.

The 10,000 hour thing is about mastery. Is someone who spent ten weeks learning about organic chemistry able to operate on the same level as someone who has been working in the field for decades? I suspect the answer is no.

Anyone can learn how to play golf in just a few minutes, but what does it take to become a PGA-level player? The theory is that it only takes 10,000 hours of focused practice and it is currently being put to the test: http://thedanplan.com/

Two things come to my mind:

- the test: learning science is done via text. no tangible tests. as opposed to the pioneer of the subject field. They didn't pop theory out of thin air. Lots of intermediate steps/theories failed, many experiences that produce hints. Education systems assume students can cut corners on this and reach the same level of intuitions as the masters ? .. seems wrong.

- 'meta': the first subject you spend 10K hours on to reach some level of mastery, the next subject won't require as much, a lot of the first 10K journey was mostly about learning yourself, teaching yourself patience with regard to the relationship between preciseness and scalability. How to keep moving smoothly cm by cm when your goal is 1M meter.. Also detaching ego,emotions and perception. Don't be angry or sadistically attached to solve the problem. Focus on .. focus, not missing data, immersing yourself. Less emotions means to me less distraction, the less you miss the faster you reach your goal. Now that you've experienced a 1M meter journey, it will probably feel a lot easier the next time.

Anyone can learn how to play golf in just a few minutes, but what does it take to become a PGA-level player?

The corollary is, what does it take different people to become a PGA-level player?

That is to say, the second question is, is being a PGA star within reach of anybody, so long as they can do 10,000 hours of golf? Or does it take Tiger 10,000 hours while it takes me 20,000 or 30,000 hours?

Couldn't tell you, but it would certainly fit with the concept of some folks having a bit of a "natural ability"; 'Everybody can become a master, but some people can get there faster'.

>If it takes you 10,000 hours to learn the BASICS of organic chemistry,

Disclaimer: I had to put in something akin to a 1,000:1 hour ratio type effort to learn stuff like that.

That's not really the point to the 10,000 hour rule though. It is about practice.

If it takes person A five weeks to learn the study and it takes person B 10,000 hours to learn the study, after the next 10,000 hours of working in the industry, can we consider both individuals masters? Or are you suggesting that mastery is somehow proportional to time to original training completion?

>Well I think most of it is time, the whole 10,000 hours thing.

Please stop repeating Gladwell's pseudo-scientific BS.

Putting in a lot of hours is necessary but not sufficient to become excellent at something.

I'll be honest I've never read his book but the 10,000 hours fits as an analogy to the hard work that one must put in to be an expert.

Sure 10,000 hours isn't going to make you excellent but focused hard work can and most of the time does.

You can become good in under 10,000 hours I just used it for reference. Maybe you would have preferred this: http://norvig.com/21-days.html

It is actually Anders Ericsson's[1] theory, popularized by Gladwell. Feel free to read Ericsson if you like, but he says basically the same thing, though neither he nor Gladwell ever said "put in the 10,000 hours and you will be the Tiger Woods". Ericsson has studied the realm of expert learning (for quite some time) and tries to tease apart what makes Tiger Woods, and those like him, able to attain the things they do. He has a lot of evidence that it is not some inborn talent but rather (shockingly) a shit-ton of hard work (and the quip "You'll never be Tiger Woods because your dad wasn't Earl Woods"). The book Talent is Overrated[2] is also a decent read on the topic. It also tells the somewhat humorous story of László Polgár[3], who wrote about how he was going to turn his yet to be born children into chess stars through rigorous training/practice, and then proceeded to do so.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Ericsson

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Talent-Overrated-World-Class-Performer...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r

I find that interesting. Would you mind sharing examples of some things that you tried to improve at, but couldn't?

A lifetime of observation of painful personal experiences. I don't really want to go into it publicly.

I read somewhere that it's common for people to plateau at a certain skill level, but some people overcome that. My google fu is not working for me, but I think it was to do with changing the approach. I've also heard of changing how you view yourself, imagining you already have the ability, "what would X do?" (Usain Bolt actually peaked and burned out when was younger, regained with a new coach, less training, and exercises to compensate for a congenital spine defect). i.e. Also, while at a plateau at one specific thing, there are many other things where effort still works (not overgeneralize from that one thing). I'm also plateauing (at discrete mathematics), so I'm interested in the answer here. Many creative people talk about leaving something that they are stuck at, and doing other things (perhaps a short break, perhaps for a long time) - then the answer (sometimes) comes to them, when they see with a new point of view. Talking to people about it can help (even "explaining to a duck").

Of course, maybe there are attributes that we can't change, like height, that seem as insurmountable barrier. While these may be a limitation in themselves, we may be able to work around them (e.g. professional basketball players under 6 foot http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-shortest-nba-players.php). And, well, there are invasive ways to increase height, medically.

There are three stages when learning a skill ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_apprenticeship#Overvi... ) :

The cognitive phase where you think about what you are doing and develop strategies to complete the task. The associative phase where you practice, eliminate mistakes and learn what works. The autonomous phase where you don't have to think about what you are doing anymore.

It is likely you are reaching a plateau because you entered the autonomous cognitive phase. To get off this plateau you should : focus on staying in the cognitive phase by thinking about what you are doing. Set yourself goals in proficiency and most importantly, stay off you comfort by going (~10%)faster than your cruising speed or performing a task more difficult than you are comfortable with. e.g : repeat the harder parts of songs you haven't mastered yet instead of playing the same old song you have mastered, type 10% faster on the keyboard and note the mistakes you make,...

I tend to have thoughts that maybe I have a genetic disadvantage that prevents me from excelling from things that I care about (programming, computer science, drawing, etc.), but I would rather die with the illusion that I could succeed in anything I set my heart to, than in to throw in the towel and accept that I'm hopeless. Having that mindset is working out for me so far.

If I never give up and I never get better, despite trying new methods, what does that mean?

Also, if everyone says, "If you failed, you haven't tried enough, despite years of effort", what do I do?

Readjust what "failure" means for you. If you've improved, it's not a total failure. Pursue what you love, and steadily improve upon it.

It's common for people to always adjust their goals upwards when a milestone has been met. But it's also healthy to adjust them downwards, and take satisfaction in the act of improving.

My fallback example of overcoming something I thought I never would is playing an F chord on a guitar. Sure, a lot of people can play this easily, but just knowing that there was a time when I thought this was beyond my reach to now being able to play it as well as a C, A, G, E, D, etc chord is a constant reminder to stay in the growth mindset.

To be fair, I think drawing is an exceptionally good example of a learnable skill. Is the same true of music, though? If someone has trouble hearing and distinguishing intervals, can that person learn music? What about ballet, which pushes physicality just about as far as it can go?

BTW, ear-training is part of just about any decent music-theory course.

You probably can't give perfect pitch to someone who's tone deaf. You can definitely teach them to recognize intervals, though. In my counterpoint course, there were some people who had terrible pitch recognition at the beginning of the course who were halfway decent by the time it was over.

It's tough to say. It partially depends on how you define the ability to play music. I definitely think that the average person can play notes on a piano given enough time for another average person to enjoy.

On a person-to-person basis, we don't know until we try. Kind of like knowing the half-life of some material: we know the decay rate of a large mass, but we can only guess at a per-atom level, and we only truly know when it finally decays. I don't hope to belittle your question, but I don't find it particularly important what the average person can do. I find it much more important to figure out what I can do.

Keyboard instruments have the advantage that note formation is relatively straight forward compared to (say) the violin, but then you do have to play two handed, i.e. at least two lines of music.

"It partially depends on how you define the ability to play music."

We tend to judge ourselves against recordings of the best artists, and those recordings may have been heavily edited. Before recordings were easily available, amateur music making was much more widespread. I think I can see signs of a return to social music making for the fun of it.

Your mention of unrealistic comparisons reminded me of the Dove evolution commercial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U

The original question asked about whether a person can "play music" or "do ballet". I want to add "being beautiful" to the list because I think it will help me express my point that I want to make.

I believe that most people can improve on most skills, and that improvement is correlated to the time and effort they put into it. I believe that "being beautiful" counts among these skills along with "playing music" and "doing ballet". The reason I added "being beautiful" to the list is because I have found an attitude among many people, even those with a "growther" mindset, that treats beauty as static. I argue that the general expectations (or at least the projected expectations, which to the projecting person is the same thing) is unreasonable, causing many people to think of their improvements as failures because they fall short of those unreasonable expectations.

So if one defines the ability to "play music" as the ability to produce live music that is on par with best-selling recordings, then I argue that no, the average person cannot "play music". Likewise if one defines the ability to "be beautiful" as the ability to look as flawless as the final product in the Dove evolution commercial. I find definitions like these to be unreasonable because these definition/expectations discourage the average person to try to play music or be beautiful when it may bring them and the people around them much joy.

I hope that you are right that people can shed these expectations and do things for the fun of it. I see signs of it in music too.

Is there a reason you believe drawing is a learnable skill? Betty Edwards has shown that it is learnable by actually constructing a curriculum that lifts horribly bad drawers into competent ones.

In an almost identical but betty-edwards free universe, do you have any reason to believe the same?

Do you have reason to believe the opposite about music?

Yes, it's possible someone might not be able to learn it but I believe this is rare. If you can recognize common tunes from the melody alone, you almost certainly hear well enough to recognize intervals; it's just a matter of practice.

> Anyway, Edwards’s theory is that ‘bad’ drawers don’t look at the thing itself and draw its shape, they translate reality into abstract concepts first and then draw what that concept visually looks like.

This is so true.

By squinting one of your eyes (looking through only one eye) you can approximate the 'upside down' effect pretty remarkably.

Drawing is all about the relation of shapes to each other. Portrait drawing is too - but has the additional constraint of very little tolerance for off-by-one errors. Everyone is particularly attuned to facial recognition - lines that are off by even a millimeter or a fraction of an inch (by position or more generally - the angle) - you notice that. It is the difference between a portrait that looks like someone, a portrait that looks like someone else (but not her).

If you want to get better in portrait drawing and don't have the luxury of a live model posing for you, don't draw from pictures. Draw from live TV (like a newscast where the poses are relatively static but still fluid).

I've been taking a progression of art classes for just over a year now. A year is actually a long time in art class world. Really enjoying the escape from coding. It rocks because you lose yourself (like when you are on a focused coding tear). Have gotten much better yet have still so far to go. Have plateaued many times.

In my Portrait Drawing class, the thing that stopped me most was trying to draw what I thought the eye/nose looked like and actually drawing what it looks like. My internal model of what the eye/nose looks like is flawed because I lack experience. As an aside, if you look at other people's portraits of the model - there is usually part of the portrait that resembles them.

The professor was amazing. She could take a blank piece of paper and in 15 min. create the person's portrait, capture their essence. If she worked on it more and more, it got even better. But she got the basic essence in a very short time. She didn't make mistakes in positioning - like most of us in class did (we did get better by the end of the course) - to draw fast - you need to draw very accurately and with confidence. Mistakes can be corrected, up to a point.

If you don't draw the eye as it really looks, you can easily end up with something that looks like an egyptian mummy. There is a very clear orbital socket that needs to be shaded/drawn - without that the eye isn't an eye. Shading is so, so important.

Adding the little stuff to your drawing - like adding a little more shading to the half/side of the pupil that is on the dark side (away from the light) makes a difference. By itself, it doesn't add up, but it makes it look better - when adding all the other little stuff.

Now, drawing in public (e.g. someone's portrait for money in 15 min.) is a whole different ballgame. At least, starting with a controlled environment (precise teacher feedback) is a start. I believe the key is to have the basics down (and basically do a Mr. Potato Head from your experience drawing the basics)