[W37-39] You’re gonna hate every project you ever worked on

At one point

🐝 What I worked on

👩‍💻 Coding

I heads down at my portfolio website in the past 2 weeks. Here’s what it looks like right now:

Oh silly me, I thought 80% of it was done when I figured out how to route a NextJS page from a ThreeJS scene. It was just the first 20%.

I did a skill-sharing sesh with a senior designer friend. He helped me completely restructure the website, focusing a lot more on the coherence and story-telling aspects¹. Seeing him keyboard-shortcut through Figma was 🤯. The past 2 weeks was just me implementing those insights, which come in little details like “click this one button which has this mini animation effect,” “Yeah but like make it slow down at the end,” and “make this 3D button slightly shift up upon hovering.” And those details take A LOT of work.

I worked on the website so much that last week I started to hate it. Wow, how come there’s just more and more work to be done with it? This <div> is not setting the margin correctly whyyyyyy.

Creative projects have phases. In the first electrifying phase, every idea a gold mine, everything you touch an✨inspiration✨. Then you start and it’s a mix of “yayy fun” with “uhmm this is hard.” After a while, it’s just execution, pure execution to bring your grand “simple” ideas to life. Towards the end, as you drag your feet through glass you wonder why you get yourself into this project. You finish half-satisfied and see all the holes to improve but decide to move on anyway. But a few months later you look back and conclude that “it wasn’t half bad.”

Despite all the grunts, I wake up each day working on the website. Every meditation session starts with trying to focus on my breath and warding off ideas on how to implement or improve the website.

I think I’m learning what it’s like to love something. To show up for it on days not an inch of me feel like it. To commit to finishing something. And like, without a company paying me to do so. Not with just projects, but with myself too. I go to the gym on days I don’t feel like it, clean the room on Sundays when I don’t feel like it, compliment myself when I don’t feel like it. It’s a newfound confidence to know I can love something, someone, and show up in this way. I feel like a persistent cockroach that will survive the extinctive tsunamis of self-doubt and judgment - disasters that have obstructed me for years.

✒️ Writing

I took a day break from coding to learn how to write and kept writing my piece on “What good therapy means.” I’m practicing a new writing approach from “A few short sentences about writing” by Verlin Klinkenborg. It’s much much slower than I’m used to. Testing that approach out with this piece and we’ll see how long it takes me =)).

An exercise from the book: how to read like a writer

🥡 Takeaways

1. Apprentice model is the shiet:

   Last weeks, I had a few interactions with very high level coaches that significantly change the way I approach the crafts. At my gym, one day I was the odd one out, so the head coach drilled with me for 30 minutes. She fixed every little details in my technique - elbow in, chin down, feet forward. “Beginner” things I thought I was beyond. Then she said, “your footwork sucks, go do mirror work.” I waved my tail and happily shadow boxed basic moves for the rest of the class.

   That 30 minutes changed all my gym class forwards. I have more balance, my guards are better, my hooks stronger. I went to a dance class, and I understood what it’s like to feel balance from my feet up.

   Or when designer friend masterclassed Figma and design for me. Now I look at every web experience with so much more understanding of what story it’s trying to tell, whether it’s coherent or not.

   I want to keep learning this way - guided by my interests and get pointed to the right kind of details from masters.

2. There are crafts I like and there are crafts that make my heart sings:

   With this website, I discover that I like coding. But when I was watching Sean Wang’s shorts, my heart sang. I want to do more filmmaking. It’s like, the scariest craft I’ve ever worked on, so I procrastinate a lot. After all my short film footages got wiped out, I haven’t worked on any video properly. So here I am making a public accountability statement to output a video by the end of April.

🧐 Question of the week

• How to find masters to apprentice from? Or how do you show up in a way that make these people want to teach you?

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This is the week #37-39 update of my daily creative challenge, as outlined in the Re-manifesto of this blog. I’m inspired by MỞ - Mơ và Hỏi’s course, Writing On The Net 2 (#wotn2), and all my friends who write and create consistently!

1. Thanks so much, Arjun. I don’t know how me teaching you how to make mapo tofu was an equal skills exchange 🤣.