Whenever someone “wings” something, it’s often in the context of important things like exams and job interviews. Heck, even I’ve winged some really important tests and interviews myself, and in all those instances, luck has been an unlikely, godsent partner in crime. However, in all those instances I at least somewhat knew what I was doing, even if I hadn’t prepared in advance. But what about when it’s something you know absolutely nothing about? What happens when your people-pleasing self takes on a monstrous task, and now you’re sitting at your desk staring into nothingness?
Let me paint you a picture: It’s 2021, and my fourteen-year-old self has just gotten Instagram. She aspires to be a “mental health awareness advocate” on the internet by posting inspirational quotes on her page. So she opens Canva without watching a single YouTube tutorial on how to use it. All she has is the quote and a rough vision of her post in her mind. She starts tinkering with the various tools, following no professional method whatsoever. Yet, after about an hour of playing around with text, colours and elements, driven by an inexplicably keen aesthetic sense, she finally creates a decently professional-looking post. Ogling at it with pride, she trips over her own fingers in a rush to post it on Instagram, eager to show her massive following of about a hundred people her first piece of graphic design!
As far as I can remember, I have never watched any tutorials about Canva at all. My “learning” consisted of frantically asking questions on Google, physically abusing my laptop when the tools didn’t cooperate, and probably having seven crashouts over the course of a single design project. Yet all that led to where I am right now—a fairly competent Canva user able to whip up interesting designs for social media posts. This is what gave me the confidence to take up an even more intimidating challenge of editing a tricky little video, when I barely knew the ABCs of video editing. Yet again, after almost two days of relentless hyperfixation and a disturbed night of sleep, not only was my brain waving an imaginary white flag, but the video had finally been edited to perfection.Â
The point of all of this is that whenever you set out to try something new, sometimes you actually end up learning better when you just throw yourself into its midst and try figuring it out yourself, rather than trying to learn it or prepare for it beforehand. Not to say there isn’t any value in preparation or systematic learning, but sometimes we often get so caught up in knowing exactly what to do and how to do it that we lose sight of our goal altogether. After all, which kid watches a YouTube tutorial on how to ride a bike after training wheels are removed? Instead, kids simply fall multiple times until they can finally balance on a bike, despite the wide array of scrapes and scabs all over their limbs.
Speaking of which, failure is a daunting yet immensely important aspect of the art of winging it. Crashes, falls, typos, glitches and other kinds of hurdles may as well be the best way to learn the craft. For instance, accidentally deleting all my work on Canva made me realise that a simple Ctrl+z could bring it all back. This saved me a lot more time and energy than trying to search up “Canva shortcuts for technically challenged dummies” on YouTube. Because in reality, no amount of mugging up can prepare you for the breadth of unpredictability that gets thrown at you.
Still can’t deal with the uncertainty of novelty? Just think of your parents raising you. They may have read all kinds of parenting books before you were born, so that they’d know what to do when you cried or fell sick or threw a tantrum. But what could have prepared them for dealing with you hysterically bawling over the death of your first pet fish? Or when you very intentionally swallowed a stray piece of thread as a toddler? This goes to show that even the most momentous things like raising a child don’t come with a user manual or a step-by-step tutorial, and yet somehow your parents managed to shape you into a functional person. With each curveball they adapted, made one mental note after another, and implemented their lesson on their growing, volatile human being the next chance they got.
So, what makes you think you need to by-heart the precise how-to of everything you do?Â
Ditch the perfectionism. Get messy, screw up, do it again and screw it up again. And every time you think “Oops, shouldn’t have done that”, you learn.