Incompetent comparison
An essay…
Classes started on Tuesday. With it, my long marathonic days for which I think I am getting too old to keep, also started. Between the studio classes, office hours, and physical therapy after my surgery, not much is left in terms of inspiration or musing about topics. That is until one of my students* asked to meet with me. I must admit her email left me a tad worried because no details were offered. I became a little concerned that she was going to tell me that she was changing her major.
*Before I continue, I wanted to make it clear that she gave me permission to share her name and talk about our meeting.
I met Ashari* when she was a freshman. She was my student in the two dimensional design class. From the get go, something in her caught my attention. While she was eloquent in her discussions, it was her meticulous attention to detailed exploration and desire for communicating meaningfully that really impacted me. When she was taking that class, she wanted to be a studio art or a painter. Nowhere in her radar was the thought of being a graphic designer. We had several conversations about it and her answer was always: “I’ll think about it”. That was as good as it was going to get so I had to wait and see.
Since then, every academic year we sit to talk about her questions and her intentions for that year. This has impressed me because it shows me that everything she does, she does with intention and meaning. This year was no different. When we sat to talk, she went through these questions with me:
How do you deal with comparing yourself to peers?
How do you deal with feeling incompetent while you're still learning?
How do you deal with the pressure to be the best (even in smaller scale instances like when you were in college, or when learning a new topic)
I thought it would be a good idea to share my answers here. Being that is the beginning of a new academic year, I thought they were good things to think through.
On comparison
We spend considerable amount of time comparing ourselves with others— so much so that it leads us to feeling less than, left out, and isolated. We then turn our attention to ourselves to maybe over indulge in negative thoughts about the work we do and even our self worth.
I don’t think any of us are immune to it. We do it. All the time. Assuming all things are stable and equal, we often find that anybody else is doing better at anything than we are. They may get a tad more attention or may receive a particular honor, and we look around and somehow find our situation much more precarious than it really is.
We seem to never be content with what we have or don’t have. And my answer to my student when she asked me was that partly it is inevitable to feel less. One of my professors at Iowa State University, used to say to our classes: “there will always be someone better than you and someone who is worse than you”. I live or try to leave in that space. Let me rephrase, I try to leave in the space of knowing and accepting that there will always be someone who is better than me. Period. I don’t review the second part of that aphorism. In my experience those who really learn new things and keep growing become keenly aware of what they need instead of what others do not have. It leads to arrogance, I think.
My best solution for when I feel less than, is to keep creating. It consumes my mind with what I am doing that I end up not caring so much for who or what others do. That process creates practice and practice improves skills.
I told my student we engage in idolizing others so much that we forget they too bleed. Our heroes are just people. Our inspirations are just people. And because they are people, they too feel things the way we do. My student walked away with “I will start doing more humanizing and less idolizing”.
Incompetency
When I was in Italy, I would sometimes try to order in Italian. One day I wanted to order slices of bread and no butter. The word for butter is burro. The word for beer is birra. Because of the similarities between these two words I got mixed up and unintentionally ordered bread and no beer. “Pane senza birra.” And that could not have been more ridiculous. We handled the miscommunication with a lot of laughter and finally I cemented forever in my brain that burro is butter. It was an incompetent and ridiculous moment albeit hilarious. My waiter and the owner were delighted to poke some fun at me and I rolled with it. To prove to you how charming my waiter was, I am attaching a picture below.
That is my server handing me a double expresso which I got used to drinking after lunch. Their expressos were not as strong as I expected them to be.
See, feeling incompetent when you are trying, is part and parcel with learning. We can’t learn if we don’t fail or if we don’t mess up. Messing up means we tried to put something in practice, failing means we tried to incorporate a new skill or knowledge, and the incompetence that happens in the process of learning is a good thing. We should all learn to fail and fail well. This does not include arrogant incompetence— the incompetence that is aware but does not care.
I am not often afraid of looking stupid or ridiculous. Often I embrace it. And yes, I have been hurt and have hurt others in the process but all I can do is get up and try again, and if I hurt someone, apologize.
Pressure
One of the most fascinating things in life is that no two people will solve a problem exactly the same way. This is partly why it is sometimes hard to deliberate copyright issues. We can be similar but not exact. Yes, there are exact copies out there of anything. But a copy is never the original. We all know that, right?
We appreciate the learning process that takes place when copying something because they are the best and we want to be the best. But, the best at what? And by who’s standards? And by what measures? An art or design competition says that x art or design was the best at that time, under that circumstance, and under the selected jury’s eyes, for that particular moment. That is all it says. If we think about it, it seems like a severely limited set of parameters.
Not only are the parameters limited but they are also somewhat subjective. I remember entering an artwork to a competition. It did not win anything for that particular competition. Later on, it was selected to be one of the 100 Best Artworks of 2021 by Creative Quarterly. I was and I am incredible grateful for it. It hangs on my wall as a reminder that the parameters for selection will always need to be subjected to a limited criteria. And that is okay.
One thing I told my student is that we all accomplish things on a daily basis that we take for granted. When I feel less than, I remember the things I have been able to accomplish so far and realize how blessed I am. I am incredibly grateful I get to do art and design for a living. I get paid to teach others how to do the same. I get clients who pay me to create beautiful things for them to enrich their businesses and lives. I am paid to put something beautiful in the world and that is enough, more than enough; that is amazing.
My student can be found here: @ashari.designs. When I asked her permission to talk about our chat, she sent this blurb that I thought was very appropriate to include:
I know that as a designer I sometimes struggle with linking my ability as a designer to my self-worth, and I know that so many of my peers do too and that they feel discouraged when they perform poorly on a project, or if someone is "better" than them on the assignment. My struggles are in no way unique, and I wanted to know things to say to myself, and to say to others in those moments.
Love,
Alma