As you get better at a craft, you start to notice details that others don’t. This is simply the result of doing the activity for so long that you’re intimately familiar with how it works. If you’re used to drawing comics, you might notice how the dialogue, pacing, and perspectives are done in each panel. For those who aren’t as familiar with the craft, they will notice good work, but not the details. You, on the other hand, can see them.

If you ask me what kind of projects are my favourite to work on, my answer is clear: the ones where you can move forward a little bit each day, but take a long time to achieve. I love the process of getting better each day and working towards a goal. Whether that goal is finite or open-ended doesn’t really matter to me. What matters is the process.

If I showed you two shades of red, there’s a good chance you would answer that they are both red. It’s only if I showed you both shades side by side that you might switch up your answer to be more specific. Even then, you might not even notice the difference.

When I was in my final year of secondary school, we needed to fill out an “information” section for our entry in the yearbook. One of the pieces of information we were asked was, “What is your dream accomplishment in the next ten years?” I love endurance sports, so I figured that going for one of the biggest events in all of endurance sports - the Ironman triathlon - would be incredible to finish. That’s what I wrote down.