How to Learn Anything (including Awesomeness)

The picture you see above is a sneak preview of a shirt I’ve designed and will be offering for sale at some point in the coming month. Printing it has been a huge ordeal because the nature of the design is pushing my screen printing talents far beyond my capacity.

The design is made up of a ton of Jetsons-style spaceship cars. I used to draw similar spaceships in the margins of my notebooks when I was in elementary school. A recent trip to LA to see Murakami’s latest traveling exhibit inspired me to revisit the doodles. The MOCA has some great videos of Murakami showing off his exhibit. I drew a bunch of them and came up with a design that does not lend itself very well to printing. I’ve spent the past month trying to get it to work, with limited success but abundant learning—learning about printing and learning how to learn.

I’ve learned that if you want to learn to do something, you should learn the hard way. It takes time, but it helps develop a clear and careful mind. If you do it right, you’ll also become awesome. It’s also easy! (wait, what?)

You can learn the hard way by following these 4 simple steps:

1. Try to do something that you don’t know how to do
2. a. Don’t ask for help or…
   b. Ask for help, but don’t listen carefully
3. Don’t get angry or frustrated when things don’t work
4. Repeat (doing the opposite of step 2a or 2b)

Each of these steps is immensely important. You won’t learn a thing if you don’t deliberately take each one.

Step one is obvious. If you want to learn something, you need to step outside your boundaries. It might require taking time away from other things, going outside, the purchase of equipment, or even interacting with people you don’t know. Most certainly, it will require that you like you don’t know what you’re doing.

I advocate steps 2a or 2b with some trepidation because they seem foolish, but I can’t deny that they’ve worked for me. I have yet to meet a more effective teacher than my own mistakes. That said, I have yet to meet a more effective teacher’s assistant than someone who knows what they’re doing—I’ll talk about this more when I discuss step 4.

Mastering step 3 will make you a master of life. Being awesome, by definition, is hard. Learning awesomeness, therefore, will not come easy. My own experience with screen printing (among other things) has taught me that there’s nothing to be gained from huffing and weeping bitter tears when my prints don’t come out the way I intended.

Screen printing requires a handful of processes, each of which is critical to the outcome of a project. Failure to properly carry out the initial processes will certainly complicate any subsequent processes. Losing an entire day’s work because of an error is really frustrating, but there’s no time for wallowing in one’s own ineptitude. I’ve learned this the hard way, several times, which makes a nice segue to step 4.

Start again. You can’t get to step 4 without step 3. That is, you can’t pick yourself up and keep going if you give in to frustration.

A beautiful thing about this process is that step 1 will always be there. I will never be able to say that I’ve “mastered” screen printing. I could spend my entire life experimenting with different inks and media. What’s more, I can also spend my entire life making mistakes along the way.

An even more beautiful thing about this process is that once you get to step 4, you will have some good questions to ask people who have gone before you. If you don’t ask for help at this point, you are an idiot and will never be awesome.

If you don’t know already, Grizzly Bear is a contender for the best band of the millennium. Listen to some songs they recorded for Daytrotter. When Grizzly Bear played with the LA Philharmonic last month, their clarinetist, Chris Taylor, said “You don’t need to go to college, you just need to talk to people about stuff.” I don’t remember the context, but he made me laugh, and then I realized that he spoke the truth.

There is no better way to learn or make friends than by asking someone for help with a sincere desire to learn. If they’re willing to lend a hand, they’re good people. If you’re good enough to honor them by learning from them, they might keep teaching you things.

A university is actually a great place to find people willing to teach you things, but it’s a better place to get a piece of paper that says that you went to college. If you can’t afford to go to college or would rather spend your time and money elsewhere, find somebody who’s good at something that you want to do and see if you can talk to them about it. Just make sure that you have some good questions for them—it’s just good manners.