A misc note today. I meant a few short pieces, but it turned into two essays of some length.
Lately I've been trying to learn something new, getting weekly online lessons from an expert.
How to use a certain digital tool.
This person has over thirty years in the industry and is top-tier in that field.
That said, the market itself isn't huge, and not that many people want to learn the tool — plus the teacher has a give-first spirit — so relative to their experience, the lessons are remarkably cheap.
I'm grateful people like him exist. I should have contacted him sooner.
He teaches well, I can feel myself improving, and every session feels fresh and fun.
He entered the industry about thirty years ago, so digital tools weren't mainstream then. He's done years of analog work too, and hearing those experiences — and understanding the industry structure — is genuinely interesting.
Different era, different industry from mine: I'm reminded how much of the world I don't know, and I want to know more of what I don't know.
When I asked why he entered this industry:
The job came from a newspaper want ad; they were short-staffed so he started immediately — and from day one it felt like heaven, he said.
Since then he's raised his skill as a craftsperson in that industry and works as a sole proprietor.
No interest in alcohol or cigarettes, no golf or gambling — he loves the craft so much that work and hobby blur, and he just keeps doing it.
How lucky. I'm so jealous.
He welcomes technical progress and levels up his skills accordingly.
New AI advances, tool feature updates — all welcome.
Even if tech grows and the risk of job replacement rises, his thinking is: just polish what only humans can do that generative AI can't, and surpass it. So reassuring. Simply cool.
He didn't enter the industry to make money — if that were the goal he'd have quit long ago. And no matter how easily AI can generate the work, the work itself is so fun for him that he doesn't want to let AI do something this enjoyable — I laughed hard at that. Craftspeople are wonderful.
Again I felt envious of that way of living. In this life I don't think I'll get that obsessed with work — but I earnestly want to find a hobby like that.
Also, learning something new is fun — and truly hard.
There's still so much I'm missing. I can't do what I'm bad at; I feel humbled and think I'm a mess.
Year by year I learn fewer things from scratch, so chances like this are precious. I want lots of experience learning new things.
Especially: paying an expert to teach you is still the fastest way to acquire something.
Self-study and you don't know the capacity; get stuck and you can't move forward.
Not only skills — hearing industry talk from a teacher and gaining knowledge is fun too, so I'd rather learn from a person when I can.
That means I still have to practice a lot myself, and some things never improve if aptitude and interest aren't there.
Still, time spent learning something new is meaningful for a life.
(I once studied saxophone for about a year, never found practice time, didn't improve at all after a year — but I got to hear music-industry stories from the teacher, and I learned saxophone really isn't for me, so it was a good experience. Incidentally I want to learn bass someday, but after that experience I suspect it won't go well.)
Also: I'm very clumsy, but I've been drawing illustrations lately.
It's fun. There's a wonderful drawing app called Procreate — ¥2,000 one-time purchase — and I draw on iPad.
Priority is writing for fun; I can't get too elaborate, so one illustration takes about twenty minutes.
I find cool people on Instagram, or have ChatGPT generate a rough composition and character image from a prompt, trace that loosely, then finish with my own original work.
At first I was going "one a day!" — early on it didn't move, but lately I'm used to the app, so about once every two days.
Incidentally I hadn't updated the blog because studying the tool with the teacher and drawing illustrations were more fun, and I slacked on blogging.
Still, writing is writing — after blogging this long I've felt how important it is to put what I feel into words, so I want to keep going.
On why taking a position — even while you don't fully understand — is useful.
When predicting some future, accurately hitting what happens, how, and when is hard.
Still, based on your own hypothesis from analyzing the present, you should be able to forecast a rough direction.
In stock investing, for example, you can't know in advance that the price will be xxx yen on such-and-such date — but if it's a binary of up or down, you can predict, and you can take one side of the position.
It might go that way, or it might not. So be careful of risk — commentary like that has little meaning.
If you take a position for now — "I think this" — then when time passes and a result comes, you can check where that hypothesis went wrong, and the precision of your thinking process rises.
Even if practical gains are expected and precision rises, no thinking process applies universally — confirmation bias can strengthen and you can still lose.
Still, mentally: life is short, you don't have time to research and verify everything, and often what matters is a judgment axis you can personally accept — so beyond practical benefit alone, sharpening your thinking process is worth it.
© 2024 ZUUHE