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I've written before about my fear of failure and my struggle to determine what it is I truly want to do. I had a funny experience with it recently.
I've been considering taking up drawing as a hobby, so last week I went out and bought some fineliner pens and sat down to start Drawabox, a free online drawing fundamentals course.
I read halfway through lesson 0. It includes a video where the creator of the course harps on what he calls "the 50% rule." Basically, for every minute you work on lessons and exercises from the course, you must spend equal time free-drawing with no regard for what you've been learning. Just drawing whatever. The creator was very frank that most students hate this requirement, but he explained it's value relating to the fear of failure.
Basically, many students avoid drawing out of a fear that their drawings won't be good enough - they'll be embarassingly bad. But, this presents issues: students who never stray from the course material don't develop the skill of applying their learning to drawings beyond the course. It takes Play to develop that skill, but skilled people are often unwilling to do the playing required to develop it.
I realized that I haven't maintained that skill in my current hobbies, most notably code, but also music to a lesser extent. I remember playing a small jam session at town con in October - it was great fun, and I found myself surprisingly capable of playing by ear. With code, I've had numerous project ideas, but I don't follow through on them because I'm worried they'll expose my lack of skill. The only way to truly improve on beating that fear is to go through it.
So I've stopped Drawabox, without even completing lesson 0. I've decided to make a point of playing with code to develop that skill further; the first step, for me, is tackling advent of code. I'm through day 4 at this point, and have some catching up to do. I'll probably come back to Drawabox at some point, since I like the idea of being able to draw, but maybe I'll be inspired to play with my writing or music or even more code before that happens. I still appreciate the inspiration it gave me.