“Repetition is the mother of learning.” This quote is often misattributed to Zig Ziglar. Austin Kleon attributes it as an old Russian proverb. Of course, it’s also an old Latin proverb, but its most frequently-cited source has been misattributed as Aristotle.
It probably doesn’t matter. The path forward is the same: every day, we must create, over and over, and find joy in this process.
It takes a lot of hours to become a good designer, writer, photographer, or filmmaker. Malcolm Gladwell may have been wrong about 10,000 hours being the “tipping point” for mastery, but what’s been lost in all the talk of revisionism in the past fifteen years is the fact that 10,000 hours is a helpful barometer. It’s sixty straight weeks of uninterrupted focus. It’s 250 work weeks, or five years, if one worked roughly forty hours of week with absolutely no interruptions. If you’re lucky, and spend four hours a day focused on your craft, it’s ten years to achieve mastery in any given domain. That’s no small chunk of time.
So people who make things, people who want to master their craft, can’t afford to become distracted. We can’t be intimidated by the blank page. To create something new requires confidence that the blank page is just the beginning. The blank page is an invitation, not a wall. It’s a place of triumph, not discomfort.
The blank page, the empty audio file in a DAW, or the painter’s palettes are places where rules don’t exist, where the physics of time and space can be manipulated. They are an open challenge to invent, to create.
Along the way, don’t forget what you learned as a child in math class: the blank page is a place for doodling. Even Leonardo da Vinci drew dicks in his notebooks.
The work is serious, but it must be approached with lightness. Otherwise, the results suffer.
We must find a way to do this, then repeat, over and over, until the great work of our lives is done.