Taking an Inventory of Skills to Work Towards Mastery
If you have more goals than you can keep track of, and if you’re like me you have more than a handful of instruments to learn how to play, it can be useful to sit down once in a while and take inventory of what skills you’d like to improve.
The key here is to not approach this from an overly critical lens. If you do this exercise from the standpoint of having no skills and not being competent, it’s very discouraging and defeats the purpose.
You might want to do this review as casually as you would read the newspaper or scan a long post before reading it. We don’t read these items as seriously as we do an academic paper that we will be examined on.
Keep a light approach to acquiring skills and start to slot this practice into the big picture of what you are working towards. Then take things down to their most basic form.
Applying This Idea In Practice
An example in my world is that I’ve always been interested in motion graphics and animation. It’s a bit daunting for me though, especially when you think of the massive teams that collaborate to make your favourite animations on the big screen. However, animation doesn’t have to be that complicated.
I remember seeing flipbooks as a kid that demonstrate how animation works. You flip the pages and the character moves around. Or in the case of stop-motion, an animation can be made by taking photos and slightly moving the object around.
So just focusing on animation from the perspective of its original mechanics is helpful for coming up with a plan of learning very elementary animation techniques in a program like After Effects.
I would also seek out examples of animators who make things simple, and see if there are tutorials that work in this way.
You could then break down what might be worth learning, and grade your current abilities and what might be helpful to work on next. For example:
Making a ball move around the screen - Yes
Making a ball bounce around the edges of the screen - Needs Improvement
Changing the colour of a ball - Yes
Fading the colour of a ball - Yes
Fading the colour of a ball to every colour of the rainbow - Needs Improvement
From here there is some semblance of a pathway forward to what you should be working on. When you start thinking about the giants of your industry (like the massive teams at Disney), go back to the flipbook and keep things manageable for you.
This is a long-term project, not something that can be mastered in one sitting. Yet you might be able to master one small technique in a sitting, which is far more motivating.
