Being Self-Taught Is Actually Quite Badass

There are a lot of incredible artists out there. I follow them on social media, I look at their websites, I read their bios, and a great many of them attended art or design schools. Even more of them have a degree in fine art or graphic design from a good university. They knew what they wanted to do with their life when they were teenagers. They followed through with their aspirations and they are CRUSHING IT. Sometimes I find myself oozing with jealousy at their focused and curated Instagram feed. Their TikToks are edited beautifully and engaging to watch. Their artwork is gorgeous.

Now, I’m going to put a pin in that thought and switch gears for a brief moment.

My husband is a gifted musician. He’s a self-taught guitarist. Despite what you may be thinking, he does not just bang out power chords but rather, he plays beautiful and delicate classical music. When he plays, it’s intensely expressive and it completely mesmerizes me.

I’m also a musician but unlike my better half, I spent 9 years taking private piano lessons. I’m classically trained and while this is a skill I spent years learning, my formal lessons made me play kind of robotically. I keep with the timing, I play loads and softs just as the music dictates. My playing is painfully sterile. It’s precise but it’s boring.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

When you’re self-taught, you’re not restricted to any conventional rules or ways of thinking. You won’t be stifled by the guidelines that someone else gave you. You’re not interested in the right or wrong way to make something look the way you want it to look….you just make it however you can. I’m ENORMOUSLY proud to be a self-taught artist. It means I didn’t carry on because I had teachers and grades to keep me moving forward. The only thing that has kept me on my path onward and upward is me. I for one, think that having the tenacity to teach yourself anything is rather badass (not to mention fun and completely gratifying).

Teaching yourself also means you get the freedom to learn at your own pace and on your own terms. You don’t have to work on things that don’t interest you. Your creativity gets to take any path you’d like because you’re not held back by the requirement to work on specific assignments. You don’t have to buy expensive supplies, and you won’t be graded or judged on what you create by anyone other than you.

This philosophy goes for literally anything that CAN be learned. Want to learn to cook? Weld? Speak another language? Just start. No matter what your interest is, if you really want to learn to do it, odds are you can find all the resources you need for free or on the cheap. The only thing holding you back is you. For real.

I get it, you’re busy. You’ve got a job, maybe a spouse, maybe a kid, maybe a mess of kids. Maybe you have to clean your house and care for your pets. Maybe you have to care for a sick loved one. I’m not going to make light of what a valuable commodity time is. It is SO HARD to make time for what you love. Here is my pro tip for being self-taught: give yourself just 10 minutes/day to work on your craft. That’s how I started. I gave myself 10 minutes/day but I forced myself to spend that time EVERY DAY. Let me also iterate that 70 minutes once is not going to yield the same results as 10 minutes every day. That said, if it’s what you need to do to get started, THEN FUCKING DO IT!!!

If you really want it, make time for it.