I sometimes feel/fear that the path to mastery is not about tediously learning “the building blocks”, but understanding them in the context of a masterpiece. I bring this up, because I’m working my way through Rails and have some lamentations about (what seems to be) the general perspective on scaffolding, which is: “It’s too powerful for you, and you will use it wrong, so don’t use it.”
My feeling is that scaffolding represents a “masterpiece” and while it isn’t correct for every situation, there would be more to be gained than lost on learning how to do it right – and by putting much else in the context of why scaffolding is awesome. GRANTED, you wouldn’t put Michelangelo’s The David in your kitchen, or your bathroom … and there’s many places it would NOT go, but there’s more to learn from The David than studying a lawn gnome. To make it ruby specific. If the person/people that created/developed rails thought they would use scaffolding, then isn’t that something to aspire to? To really reiterate: when it came to scaffolding, did they really just ‘throw in the kitchen sink’, or what are the situations that they thought it covered well?
Anyways, it’s with that in mind that I’m reminded about an anecdote about mastery from my friend who is a VR Artist that went to graduate school at CalArts (founded by Walt Disney), and did undergrad work at NYU Film… it was something that he shared with me about learning that profoundly influenced me, and along with the aforementioned paragraphs compelled me to write this blog. While the intro is specific to scaffolding, his anecdote is actually for all circumstances where learning something is involved. It’s been years since we had the conversation, so I called him this morning to verify the essence of his words. Luckily I remembered it correct:
“Many drawing classes will spend an entire semester focused on drawing nude models, so the student can better learn proportions and get a sense of the human body. But you can actually learn it all in about a week from one of those hacky ‘how to draw like Marvel in just 10 days!!’ books where someone just tells you the proportions, a few things about anatomy, and a few things about perspective. The teachers hate that stuff because it makes it seem like what they’re doing is easy. But the truth is: technical skill is EASY. Anyone can master drawing a still life or a portrait if they waste enough time doing it. The difficult part is realizing what you can do with the skills you have, and using them to do more than you ever thought possible. Time is finite, so if you spend an entire semester drawing one nude to get a sense of proportions, you can’t get that time back – and what’s more, despite tediously rendering each detail, you may still have no concept of anatomy. If you spend a week or two learning what the IDEAL is supposed to be, and then the rest of the semester trying to figure out how many different ways you can bend those proportions or implement them in different situations, you’ll come out ahead as an artist. Even if the person who spent the entire semester drawing ‘that one picture, one way,’ can draw it better than you, that’s fine and to be expected. But, if you tack on another semester of drawing, the person who is familiar with the multitudes of context will have an easier time drilling down on (and mastering) the details. They will emerge a better master, faster. The person who spent the initial time mastering the details of some single specific case will find it harder to generalize their experience/knowledge to a multitude of contexts, because: by the time they see the forest for the trees, they’ll have already built a habit of looking ONLY at the trees. (which is harder to unlearn, than learning how new details fit into a larger context).”