I also love to watch someone unlock this super power within themselves. To not stress out about the wonky pancake or the missing crochet stitch.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
right. I feel like the world is desperate to pretend we aren’t standing on the shoulders of giants. who wants to reinvent everything, every time. use the paths already there and find shortcuts along the way, then mark them and leave them for the next traveller.
This is why I write down everything when I’m setting something up that’s new to me. Even if I go off someone else’s tutorial I put it in my own words. That way when I come back to it later I’ll understand it and if I run across someone else that’s trying to do the same thing I have at least one step by step guide to offer them.
Recognizing that for a second would destroy the basis of private property. How can you say “this is mine” when it comes attached to the work of a million others?
Related to what you said, but not necessarily this post: I was so damn frustrated with my neighborhood community the other day. We had a vote on whether or not to repurpose a huge grass field that takes up a ton of water and sees very little use. We’re wasting a ton of money (and water) watering this pristine empty field.
The main argument for keeping the field was “we waste water in other areas of the community as well. The common-area sprinklers were on when it rained the other day. We need to address all waste before making a decision about this empty field.”
There are a lot of people that don’t realize you can make incremental progress towards a goal.
I’m trying my best but it’s so goddamn hard. I went to two trade shows past weekend and actually talked to someone new (well, the same person twice, but still). But literally every other person there had a much more extensive collection and knowledge than I do, after 5 years of obessessing over the subject.
I will always just be a very lightly informed amateur without real skills in any field.
People struggle to put themselves out there as amateurs because of this feeling, but it’s totally fine. Most hobbies wouldn’t exist without a range of enthusiasts and skills.
Like, I’ve been pretty into chess for the past couple of years, but I’m still barely “intermediate” at best. Browsing forums and stuff, it seems like everyone is a top 1% player, but that’s mathematically impossible.
It took me about 7 years to be good at my trade. I was really bad. It did not come easily. It was a nightmare, and seeing guys with less experience than me pick it up way faster than me was demolishing for my self esteem. But I kept at it, decided I was in too deep to quit and I liked it, picked up way more hours and held my head above water. Now I’m the best carpenter I know and own my own contracting company.
It sucks being a slow learner, but if you want it bad enough you can have it man.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about hobby based trade shows, it’s that the highly experienced, obsessed, informed people in obscure hobbies tend to want to spread their knowledge.
Don’t obsess over not knowing… put yourself out there and talk to people and get them to tell you what they find exciting. They will unload knowledge on you and be excited to do so.
It’s just extremely humbling to realize that in this lifetime, I will never have enough time or money to even rise to a middling position in the field. It doesn’t diminish my genuine love for the subject or my personal drive to collect and learn what I can, but at the same time some millionnaire could start in my field tomorrow and have surpassed me in every way including knowledge in just a few months, and that makes me… not envious but just sad. I’ll always be just the dog getting table scraps while the “real” players feast at unimaginable, unattainable hights in perpetuity.
I “do astrophotography.”
…I strap my phone to a telescope and I’ve been loving it lol
Hey, nobody would have questioned the worse quality cameras that astrophotographers were doing this with 20 years ago. Even though it’s your phone now, it counts!
Phones are arguably some of the most powerful consumer cameras ever built. That Nikon or Canon might have more funny buttons and settings, but your phone camera is pretty powerful on its own.
Hell my phone camera now is advanced enough that it has the ability to do “astrophotography” on its own without a telescope. The pixel series of phones after 4 has an astrophotography mode, the “ai” processing slightly corrects for star trailing. It’s been pretty crazy to just point my phone up and catch Andromeda or the Orion nebula!
In some ways phone cameras are very impressive, since CCDs are now cheap and good enough that they’re no longer the bottleneck. All the computational photography stuff they do boosts their capabilities even more.
The thing that really limits them is the size and optical quality of their lenses.
The best part of learning astrophotography is not so much in taking awesome pictures … it’s the excuse to spend hours and hours sitting outside in the dark and staring up the night sky every night. To me the pictures are a bonus.
Absolutely! Just learning the positions of everything now and being able to describe them to people during the day has been pretty awesome. “Useless” knowledge, but I’ve always loved space lol
It’s not ‘useless’ knowledge … if learning about the wider universe outside our small planet makes you realize what your place in this reality is, then I really don’t think it is useless, rather it is critically important because it makes our small insignificant existence in this vast universe far more special and humbling to the point where we look and see everything and everyone around us as so miraculous that we should do everything we can to enjoy this time that we have together in peace, love and harmony. It makes you realize its all we have and all we’ll ever be.
Definitely not useless knowledge.
Keeping looking at the stars, I’m watching the same sky as you.
I did macro photography for a while by flipping my tele lens and holding it up to the mount the wrong way.
Nothing like poverty to teach you how to do things yourself.
I grew up poor. We’re didn’t suffer or starve, mom and dad just never had any extra to give us kids anything like fancy toys or games or anything. I remember being completely bored out of my mind in the house and wanting a snack. The best thing we could come up with was toast and butter … but sometimes we didn’t even have butter so we opted for lard instead … and sometimes we didn’t even have bread! (but we didn’t opt for eating pure lard)
What that meant was that I spent all my life learning how to do things myself and on my own. I learned carpentry, plumbing, electrical, mechanics, welding, metal working, landscaping, operating machinery, small engine mechanics, boat building / repairing, hunting, trapping, camping, survival … mostly because we lived away from the city and we are Indigenous … we never had anything or anyone help us so we had to learn to do things on our own. I remember being on many snowmobile trips into the wilderness and breaking down … dad would just spend hours or even a night or two camping, tearing apart an engine, fixing a problem, putting it all back together and going on our way again. Same thing in the summer with an outboard. It all just built confidence for me and my brothers and sisters to never be stuck in any situation. We just learned to do what we could, work at it and figure it out. Sometimes we might not do a great job because we didn’t know what we were doing and other times we were geniuses because we had messed up so many times before that we finally figured out how to do it right.
Once you build the skill and confidence, you can do just about anything in any situation … then the world doesn’t feel so intimidating any more. It’s a skill and you have to learn to do it. And the only way to do it is to just go out and get started with it.
I learned carpentry, plumbing, electrical, mechanics, welding, metal working, landscaping, operating machinery, small engine mechanics, boat building / repairing, hunting, trapping, camping, survival
What a skill set! I’m impressed.
It doesn’t mean I’m the best or a professional or make the best work … I am just capable and comfortable in doing these things.
It’s amazing what you can learn when you are forced to.
Also … if anyone wants to argue intelligence … dad didn’t like speaking English, he knew how but just never liked it and preferred our Native language (his English was actually terrible) yet he was able to build several small businesses and equipment companies with city people … and I have several cousins with a grade school education and are the same way with the English language yet can tear down and rebuild entire vehicles. I also grew up watching old trappers and hunters that didn’t speak the English language at all but they played chess like grand masters.
What I’m saying is that it doesn’t matter what you know or learned in school or how much education you have … all you need is a bit of motivation and confidence and most people everywhere no matter their circumstance are capable of doing many, many things.
Don’t sell yourself short. That’s an impressive, useful skill set. Not everyone could acquire the same skills you have just by watching. And not everyone can muster the motivation and confidence to even attempt new things. And then there is the aspect that you chose to take advantage of the expertise around you. On the other end of the spectrum, you could have ended up like me with a completely shit character build where I dumped most of my stat points into being a nerd long before I knew how the game was played. Being a walking wikipedia and chatgpt-level bullshitter is quickly being obsoleted. But it will be decades before we have robots that will fix your shitter.
Sometimes we might not do a great job because we didn’t know what we were doing and other times we were geniuses because we had messed up so many times before that we finally figured out how to do it right.
As I grow older, I find this is how you become an ‘expert’. You start not knowing how to do it, then you figure out all the wrong ways to do it by doing it wrong. Eventually, when you have messed it up in more ways than anyone else you know which paths not to take and you are then the expert.
