> These kinds of steps are obvious to an adult but as a little kid it really helped me understand that movies like that are made through more or less obvious steps (want to draw a lion well? go look at a lion!) vs. magically coming into being.
I think I know what you mean. As a kid I sometimes felt really intimidated and dispirited by things that appeared to be overwhelmingly hard or seemed to require rare talent to accomplish. Kind adults breaking down how it's done and how many people or what level of preparation it takes made a huge difference then. Understanding how an average person in the normal range of abilities can do it, and that an accomplished professional has worked hard but is only "cooking with water", too.
An example: As a young kid I took guitar lessons. I was struggling with keeping time, I was very frustrated and I concluded I'm just no good at this and gave up. Later on I told this story to a professional orchestra musician and he told me that keeping time is simply hard for humans, and he still has to practice it every day and will practice for the rest of his career. It's just something he accepts as a part of what he likes to do. This completely reset my expectations of what playing music should be like, and allowed me to work on the skill and progress further.
Unfortunately I think a lot of professionals try to shroud what they do in a certain level of mystery instead, because they enjoy being looked up to and consider it the reward for their toils and hardships. Programmers are frequently guilty of this - when non-IT people naively assume every programmer is a math wizard and programmers do nothing to correct this idea, for example. I tell people that if you wake up in the morning and sketch out the steps of an algorithm for how you get from there to your cup of morning coffee, you're essentially doing what programmers do. You could do it too if you choose to dedicate the time. It's fun to see how this sometimes makes people's level of genuine interest bloom.
I think I know what you mean. As a kid I sometimes felt really intimidated and dispirited by things that appeared to be overwhelmingly hard or seemed to require rare talent to accomplish. Kind adults breaking down how it's done and how many people or what level of preparation it takes made a huge difference then. Understanding how an average person in the normal range of abilities can do it, and that an accomplished professional has worked hard but is only "cooking with water", too.
An example: As a young kid I took guitar lessons. I was struggling with keeping time, I was very frustrated and I concluded I'm just no good at this and gave up. Later on I told this story to a professional orchestra musician and he told me that keeping time is simply hard for humans, and he still has to practice it every day and will practice for the rest of his career. It's just something he accepts as a part of what he likes to do. This completely reset my expectations of what playing music should be like, and allowed me to work on the skill and progress further.
Unfortunately I think a lot of professionals try to shroud what they do in a certain level of mystery instead, because they enjoy being looked up to and consider it the reward for their toils and hardships. Programmers are frequently guilty of this - when non-IT people naively assume every programmer is a math wizard and programmers do nothing to correct this idea, for example. I tell people that if you wake up in the morning and sketch out the steps of an algorithm for how you get from there to your cup of morning coffee, you're essentially doing what programmers do. You could do it too if you choose to dedicate the time. It's fun to see how this sometimes makes people's level of genuine interest bloom.