Learn from others. That statement seems fairly straightforward, but you'd be surprised at how often it doesn't happen.
My step brother wanted to learn graphic design, so he spent 2 years teaching himself. He wouldn't watch videos or analyze other designers. He said it would influence his style and he wants to be unique. He repeated the same basic errors for months. Kerning, whitespace, color palette all the unnecessary super avoidable mistakes were made. Then after a while he began to look at how other professionals approached it. His style evolved in just three weeks.
That teaching himself approach cost him clients and cost him money.
If you want to learn a new skill, then pay attention to people who are already good at it. There's a reason they're better at it than you are. They've already tried what doesn't work and there's no need to repeat their work. It took them 5 years to figure it out. That means you can learn it in 3 months or even less, then infact you can add to it.
This looks obvious, but apparently it's not. People seem to think that by learning from someone else they're not true to themselves. We have a negative perception towards copying and I'm thinking it's probably from how we were trained in class not to copy each other during assignments or examination.
As if learning how to structure a lesson from a good teacher or how to time yeast from a good baker makes you a bad teacher or baker.
I used to worry that reading other writers would make me write like them too. But the truth is that I was already writing like other writers including myself, and doing a terrible job of it because I didn't know any better.
There are also people who never get it. They're still reinventing the wheel for every skill they learn. Proud that they're working hard. My uncle won't learn how to use Excel from anyone. He makes these huge spreadsheets by hand and I always laugh because he said all these software and AI is giving us brain rot. He's right in some ways but it all depends on how you use them because they're tools.
Standards are a thing because someone worked really hard to figure out what was good. You don't have to agree with everything, but disregarding it entirely just means you're about to go through the world of pain they went through to figure it out in the first place. Why bother?
