One of my jobs in running this blog effectively is crawling the web for cool and inspiring projects and works by both other amateurs and here and there a professional, and for awesome tutorials that are useful for you and I. While doing this, I obviously come across a lot of personal sites and pages of amateur digital artists where they showcase their works. I have noticed that there are a lot of people out there who aim too high and in the process don’t reach their full potential. To be honest, this is something I have experienced myself as well, especially since I usually try to do everything on my own. And while I have said that pride in your abilities is a very important motivational factor, it is also necessary to stay realistic as far as your abilities go. So for your sake, and for my own, I’ve created a few steps to follow to make sure you are efficient and effective, don’t waste time working on a project you do not have the skills for, and end disappointing yourself and not finishing the project at all.
- Be aware of your abilities. While a challenging new project can be a very good reason to pick up new skills, learn new techniques or even completely new software packages, and this is indeed a strategy I have used before myself, you have to realize that this does not come without a price. Learning for the project can be very educational, but also time and energy consuming, and if you cannot learn whatever you need to learn in time, very demotivating. Besides that, if you jump into a project without the intention of learning new techniques and so forth, but just to make something nice without realizing that you are just not that far along yet, you will run into quite a few roadblocks and you will just end up wasting your time. So… Make sure you have the skills, and if you don’t, that you are able to pick up and learn those skills within a realistic time frame. Yes. Indeed.
- Figure out how much time it’s going to take. If you’re aiming high in the first place, chances are this is a project that will take some time to finish. First, you have to make sure you actually have that time at all. Next you must use that time effectively, so do away with laziness and distractions, and make yourself a little planning. It doesn’t have to be anything too extensive. I’ve noticed that effective planning differs from person to person. Some may need to have everything written down exactly in an organizer, and others can just have a few notes scribbled on a scrap of paper. Just use whatever works best for you. Just remember that you’re making a significant time investment when working on a large or challenging project, and if you can’t make that investment, you shouldn’t bother.
- Learn from your past mistakes. Because it’s a bit hard to learn from the mistakes you will make in the future. You should really use your experiences with failure in the past to you’re advantage. If you keep in mind the stumbling blocks you’ve had in the past you will be better off in the present. If you know you suck at planning (see point #2), you should take more time to better that part of yourself and stay disciplined, or figure out ways to work around it if that works out best for you. You will fail in the future, and I’m sure you’ve failed many times in the past (I know I have), but the more you learn from those mistakes, the smaller the chance that you will make those same mistakes again. To extend this idea even further, you can use those past experiences and your knowledge of your own weaknesses to theorize and prepare for potential mistakes you are prone to now.
- Cut the project up into separate parts. If the project is potentially too much for you to handle efficiently, cut it up into separate parts to make it a chain of smaller more manageable projects. This will give you a lot more flexibility in both the time and the energy you put into that particular project. You are an amateur, you don’t have a lot of free time for this work, and you have less experience, especially with large scale projects. Cut that mother up. Every time you finish a part you will get an extra boost of motivation that will help towards finishing the next part, until you are done with every single part and look back at the completed work with pride and perhaps even glee. Yes, glee! I am currently doing this myself with a large project and I find that especially being able to reuse assets intelligently makes the entire process much less daunting.
- BE REALISTIC. The most important commandment of all, so important I wrote it in caps, is the last four points all bundled together in two little words. Well, one little word and one larger word. But it’s important, very important. For the title of this post I used the metaphor of aiming. Aiming is a conscious act, and the best thing to do with all conscious act is to be aware of everything. Your surroundings, your own abilities, everything. It is only by being honest to yourself that you can shoot down your target and bathe in the glory of a thousand exploding pieces of whatever it was you were aiming at. If you don’t have the abilities (yet!) and don’t have the time or energy to learn them, if the project is just too large for you to handle, don’t waste your time. With this I don’t mean to say that your idea is a waste of time, or that you’re not talented enough, or whatever, so don’t get all wound up over nothing, ok? I mean that instead of trying to tackle projects you aren’t ready for yet, it’s a much better strategy to spend your time wisely on the work you are more than capable of.
It’s great to shoot for the stars, as long as you remember that you have to overcome the earth’s gravitational pull first.
