The Daily Doable – S1:E6 They Made Mistakes Too!
When you’re learning a new skill and you’ve been trying to get better at it for awhile, do you ever get frustrated and throw up your hands and say, “I CAN’T do this?”
I know I have.
The Daily Doable – S1:E6 They Made Mistakes Too!
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Welcome to the lightly edited transcript of the video. You’ll find a link to the video below.
Hi, this is Tim Maudlin. I would like to welcome you to another episode of The Daily Doable. You’re looking at a drawing that I did. I’m an architectural illustrator, which means I draw buildings before they’re built. I’ll explain why we’re looking at this in a second.
Sometimes it’s easy to look at successful people and to think that they never make mistakes. They are so good at what they do. It’s easy to think that they never struggle. I know that’s been my case.
Whenever I draw buildings like this and create these drawings, I would get frustrated because I never could create the perfect drawing. It seems like I always made a mistake somewhere.
My perspective on that changed though. Several years ago, I had the opportunity to go to the Library of Congress. There was an exhibit celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the Comic Strip.
In a previous episode, I told you that I love comic strips. So this was a a bucket list item that I got to do. I remember walking into the hall where they had the exhibit. I saw all these drawings, these original drawings hanging on the walls. And when I walked up to them and looked really close, I got a smile on my face. I said “they made mistakes too!”
I saw places where they obviously didn’t like what they had drawn so they would take white gouache or white-out and cover that area up and then redraw it. In some cases, I even saw patches where they had patched over an entire area and redrawn it.
That gave me confidence to keep trying. And when I did make a mistake, it was okay to patch over the area and keep going. Let me show you why. If I pull this piece of paper out, you’re going to see my mistakes on full display.
Here’s where you can see some white-out where I put it down and had to redraw on top of it. And then as we scan over here, there’s another place and another place and another place, up here as well. I made a big mistake on this drawing. I forget what happened, but here’s the seam where I patched over it and that goes all the way over. I’ll feel it in the second you had to right here. That was a big mistake that I had made.
(In the drawing below, I point out some of the mistakes referenced in the video.)
The interesting thing; just like with the comic strips, whenever this was reproduced and painted, you couldn’t tell. That’s why looking at the originals, you can see all the mistakes.
Your Daily Doable is stop saying, I can’t do this. Instead say, I can’t do this, YET. Keep trying and don’t give up. And if you need to patch your work, it’s okay. You can make it better. You aren’t going to be perfect.
I learned that and I learned that by looking at some of the masters.
Coming in our next episode, we’re going to look at the topic of what do you do when you’re stuck. I hope you’ll join us for that.
Before we go, I would like to invite you to our Facebook group, Do What You Can Now and our website DoWhatYouCanNow.com.
So until next time, let me zoom in close again. This is Tim, mistakes it all, encouraging you to Do What You Can Now.
See you soon.
Bye.
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