Author: i cr8 art

By profession, I am a learning designer. I have lots of thoughts about the solutions that this sector employs (or doesn’t). These include, at least on corporate level, its addiction to PowerPoints, avoiding the behavioural science (if it can help to build addictive apps, it can help us teach people), and forcing people to learn without understanding any motivations. Small wonder then I want to understand how to learn – and why I take a magnifying glass to my own behaviour like a mad scientist. It helps that I love learning new things. But I also know that I used to be really bad at it. I still am, sometimes.

If you ever worked in training, or read any vaguely self-helpful book, you’re probably familiar with the concept of “growth mindset”. Carole Dweck wrote a book about it, arguing that our attitude about being able to learn trumps “natural inclination”, however we decide to define that. That usually means that if you are more accepting of your mistakes while learning something new, chances are, you will stick to it. If you’re a perfectionist who can’t deal with setbacks, becoming an expert is really damn hard. The concept is used relentlessly in everyone and their mother’s performance review, and it’s prominent in pop-psych consciousness. It did face some criticism: it was hard to replicate the school experiments that Dweck talked about, for example. The idea is still useful, though. It reframes setbacks as a part of a learning process, not friction that will ultimately derail it. Ask me how I know.

When I was little, I got through education really easily. I would go through most of my textbooks in the few days in the summer. In the school year, I did my homework, and multiple other people’s because I moved like an enterprising young woman. Then, I would just get bored in class. Yet, I always had good grades.

But that didn’t prepare me for learning skills independently. Most of my life, I just avoided anything I didn’t have the natural inclination for. It’s easy to become complacent if you’re coasting. It can hollow out even your genuine interests and passions.

It wasn’t until I started going to the gym (this is such a bro-motivation-page type epiphany) that this started to make lots of sense. I had never lifted any weights before then, but step by step I managed to get to the strongest I’ve been in my whole life in three years. In the gym, you are “lifting to failure”, which means that you repeat any movement with the highest possible weight until your body gives up and cannot handle it anymore. Failure guarantees progress – because if you do it often enough, the benchmark for it steadily rises.

When I had put skates on my feet for the first time at the tender age of thirty, I didn’t realise how much I would strive to prevent failure. When I first signed up for roller skating classes – the clumsiest person that you will ever know – I did anything to prevent myself from falling.

I would brace my core and my legs, and avoid any moves that could potentially lead me to falling down. As my classmates started to make steady progress, my own anxiety held me back. I wouldn’t do a crossover: lifting my leg would mean I don’t feel stable enough. Toe manuals? Oh no. Spins? Forget it. My legs would hurt me so much after every session because of how much I squeezed every muscle in the effort to keep myself upright. And I just didn’t want to fall: I saw it as something to be embarrassed about – in a class full of beginners who didn’t have a problem with falling, by the way. I thought that falling meant I am not learning, when the opposite was true.

My classmates went ahead to skate backwards. I was still stuck in the same place. Only when I started to let go – and fall, and then cross my hands, place them on my knee and stand back up – I began to make any progress. Recently, a friend invited me to skate on ice, and I discovered that the skills I’ve learned are helping me there, too. I wasn’t perfect, but I was fine – I moved on ice competently enough to enjoy the process.

One of my recent faves, Cal Newport, argues that career fulfilment doesn’t always follow an existing elusive passion. And you don’t have to even know exactly what that passion is. Sometimes it just follows expertise. This is a departure from “following your passion”, which is hard to do for those who don’t know what it is, and just as tough for those who understand that choosing a formal direction for it in your teens is a lot of responsibility and believe in all sorts of sunken cost fallacies.

While every job is going to have its ups and downs, great days as well as tiresome and boring ones, as someone who has always followed natural inclinations named by someone else, it reframed something I had never questioned before.

My entire life, I just knew that humanities was something I was naturally good at. I wrote for a local division of national newspaper as a teen. Words, at least in Polish, always came easy to me (sorry F. R. David mate, better luck next time).

I wasn’t bad at science at school either, but I never explored anything that would be closer to the intersection of humanities and science because following the natural inclination seemed like the obvious choice. And I didn’t have to try.

Yet, I would fix fairy lights with my dad, who also helped me to set up lighting for the cardboard dollhouse I made. I’ve since learned how to use HTML, CSS and JS, so I can do web dev. And I’ve got an analytic head that is good at understanding and finding patterns which I ultimately proved with my grades when doing linguistics modules at the university.

There was a correlation between choosing a natural inclination and coasting. Hitting the ceiling was easy, and without adjusting where it was, staying at the same level was easily becoming a habit. You need some pressure to make a diamond, after all.

If you didn’t develop the ability to learn, and overcome setbacks in the process, you can follow any amount of enthusiasm you want. The problem is, it will wane after the first failure. And if you’re in your comfort zone without being challenged, you will eventually get complacent. If you’re choosing that because it is easy, the gap between the natural ability and mastery will gradually grow larger until you decide it’s not worth bridging anymore. Bridging it is effort. And it’s never too late to make it.

So in my year of challenging myself to do new things in hopes passion follows expertise, and in hopes I get better at learning, this is where I will focus.

My curriculum will include learning more in-depth information about behavioural science. I have been a practitioner of some of it that overlaps with learning, but I want to be smarter about applying it, and push it further once I’ve got electronics, UX and some proper coding under my belt. Electronics/robotics are genuinely new and will push the boundaries of what I know. I fixed fairy lights as a kid and did calculations in physics without practically observing why they worked. I’d like to fix that gap. And besides, who wouldn’t want to be Iron Man, or Elisabeth Sobeck? I have been a learning designer who is competent at graphics for a while too, but I also want to polish my knowledge about UX and formalise it.

All of this is to see if I can be more intentional and improve learning as a whole – and challenge myself to do something interesting that is different than “we’re an edtech company… we make PowerPoints for people”. I’m already on that Python grind crying in Codecademy free trial every other evening for an hour.

See you at a soldering class 💖

Once upon a time, I was drunk at a gig, and I asked a gig photographer, “so how does one do what you do?”

He said, “Find yourself some bands to photograph.” So I did.

What followed was a really lovely, but also really intense, year and a half of photographing bands and working two jobs. Credit where credit’s due, I really loved it at the time: I had the chance to go to hundreds of great gigs, and met many fantastic people along the way. Some of the artists I photographed play bigger stages than ever before now.

In a sense, I became a victim of my path being quickly successful. I got good word of mouth, and in a matter of few months, I was booked out. I was taking photos every evening, on top of a day job that also required my focus and attention. A year and a half before, this turn of events would have been a dream scenario. I had even considered switching careers… had it started to pay at any point.

But then, out of the blue, I felt like I didn’t want to pick that camera up ever again. Even the prospect of doing exactly that filled me with dread I didn’t even know I could feel about something that I loved. And recently, my camera quite literally broke – and I didn’t have that pressing feeling to go and repair it, which made me sit with it for a little longer.

If you’re thinking it’s your usual “imposter syndrome” essay, I can assure you it is not. There are a lot of things I feel I am not good enough at, but I knew I was a good photographer, at least as far as technical proficiency goes. I made sure of it.

But if you take a microscope to this entire situation, none of it was particularly surprising. I mentioned to friends that I needed to “maybe take a break” before, which I never really acted on. You can’t – things speed up, and in your head, you can’t just risk that opportunity because maybe it will lead you to a bigger, better one.

I ultimately worked two jobs, with the standards set by me, myself and I – and unfortunately all of them are an insufferable perfectionist. I sometimes came back home from a gig after midnight to not sleep at all, and to deliver the photos at 7am the next day, carefully edited, because of course I am not taking any shortcuts… and semi-conscious, without sleep, I still turned up to that day job. I cared a little bit too much for what I was receiving in return. And no one should have to do it this way (so if you’re reading and considering acting in senseless ways, please don’t) – unless it’s your choice and/or you’re being properly compensated for it, I can’t fault you for making your own decisions.

I also found that it wasn’t a lifestyle match. Facing your dream career head on can have a sobering effect when you crash into things you didn’t expect. It certainly did for me. And as a person who has learned (and had to unlearn) that sometimes you need to suffer all the time to get what you want: it’s okay to want money, and stability, and some predictability of your schedule (like free evenings and weekends) that allows you to speak to your family, have hobbies and enjoy life. It’s okay not to suffer for what you make. Like, it’s really allowed. Trust me.

The whole starving artist idea is mythologising a lot of pain, and it’s also incredibly toxic to those who can’t afford being one (because paradoxically, a lot of starving artists have resources to weather any storm that wreaks havoc on their lives, and you understand that pretty quickly when you do creative stuff for long enough). If you come from a working-class family and have to rely on yourself, you’ve got no other choice than to make that happen, and sometimes the cost of that is not trying to make it big.

When you start, you have this bold idea of creative vision you’d like to maintain. It turned out that when you do this as a professional, you have to deal with people’s requests that sometimes are against what you think of as good. Then again, at the end of the day, it’s their vision you’re in service of. Photography is a service job. But sometimes, it was more requests and changes than they ever paid for, if they paid at all.

Compromise is fair. You should be striving for compromise, and there is often a good reason for it, other than just keeping the harmony. Sometimes the scope you set for yourself is far bigger than anything required, sometimes you work with people with more experience who know more than you. And even when I disagreed with someone on quality, I have learned crucial people skills that I will take with me elsewhere.

But hear me out: compromise it is not when you’re never getting anything in particular out of it. That is just saying yes and hoping for the best. It means you leave the decision about your output (and ultimately, what goes in your portfolio, or whether you’re even interested in it) up to other people. And you’re allowed to have input on collaborative projects. If you’re not, you better be paid right for it, or receive something else you need in return.

Two years have passed since that last gig that made me decide I needed to change what I was doing. For these two years, I have picked up the camera only twice: once, because someone who I’d worked with before asked me and they were good people; for the second time, because I wanted to help out someone who was starting out.

Both of these gigs made me feel good in the end, even if I spent time dreading them beforehand – but I appreciate it had more to do with the atmosphere and the working conditions. The second one will be a great closing memory for me; I am comfortable with the fact that it was probably a fond farewell to gig photography. I would be happy never to snap another photo ever again – which probably means I am still deeply burned out.

I discovered that I am way more comfortable as a person who enjoys a gig in the audience, too – because my love for (live) music will never change. And sometimes, making something a job will suck the joy out of it, and if you bring all your misplaced intensity to it, you will burn out. These days, I turn up to a set, drink in hand (I did that with the camera too, sometimes to calm down my nerves, which probably wasn’t a great habit either way) and I am free to dance and enjoy and experience the wonder that comes with a great performance of the music I love.

In hindsight, I had to do it that way. I strived for a creative career for almost the entirety of my twenties, but I am unfortunately a stubborn person (which you’d have figured out from all of the behaviour I described above). Heeding warnings? I don’t know her. No one could tell me shit. My own father could not tell me shit, and he was right trying to. Maybe that’s also the beauty of recklessness we all have when we’re twenty-something.

But some people say that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity, and I agree. I did it for a little too long.

The signs of burnout were showing in small ways when I was backstage, photographing one of my biggest gigs to date, but I put a good face on every time I decided to push through and ignore them. The camera was ready, and I made it through a narrow passage to prep for the shoot. As I walked up the metal staircase after a stressful afternoon of trying to get to the tour manager and sorting out the formalities, I thought, “this is a job like any other.” I put the strap around my neck and lifted the camera up to my face. The magic was gone.

Now I can’t really wonder what if – I did it. And the thing I’d hoped would be a dream job just wasn’t a match.

Would it be any different if I took better care of my mental health? I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe not. I ran into a few non-negotiables too many, and it’s like dating someone new: you have a honeymoon period, but eventually you figure out if you’re compatible. And sometimes, you have to make a hard choice. Perhaps I didn’t love it enough, after all.

Maybe someday, in five or ten or twenty years, I will feel like picking that camera back up. For now, the camera is broken, and I was comfortable with it sitting there, unrepaired – which I think speaks volumes. I decided to give myself a year to figure out what would be a thing that actually suits me.

And this might well be an outlet to document getting there.

This could have been a TikTok video but I cba to put my makeup on. Sorry!