 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video, number 250 as a matter of fact, and I wanted to do something special for this one. As we've done a couple of times over the course of this series, I want to take a step back and I want to talk about some more general rules for the hobby, mindsets you can utilize to help yourself. And these things we're going to talk about today actually come to us from a man named Kevin Kelly. And Kevin Kelly had written for Wired and done a bunch of other things. But he wrote an article I really liked for his 68th birthday. It was called 68 rules for life and I'll link the article below. And as I read over the article, I was amazed by how much of that article seemed to apply to the hobby. I suppose it's not too surprising because he's actually a craftsman and he likes making things himself. So my guess is there's an adjacency there that meant a lot of these things applied. But what we're going to do today is I'm going to talk about some of the items on the list that caught my eye and how I think they apply to the hobby. So this one's going to be a little more cerebral, but I do hope you go on this journey with me. So what we're going to do is just roll some of these along and then I'm going to talk about them. So here we go. So first up, being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points. And I translate that to enthusiasm is one of the most important qualities in miniature painting and you can use it to push your pieces. I can't stress this enough. Just being passionate, being enthusiastic, being positive is the most important thing you can do in the hobby. It's worth more than skill. It's worth, it's certainly worth a heck of a lot more than any kind of innate talent. It's one of the most valuable things you can do is just be enthusiastic. If you're enthusiastic to learn, to paint, to keep going, to overcome failure, then you will eventually find success in the hobby. However you're defining that, whether that's getting your whole army painted or getting a single figure painted or painting a competition level model, it doesn't matter. Enthusiasm is one of the most critical things you can have. And so paint the stuff, find the stuff, find the models, find the game that makes you passionate, that makes you enthusiastic and that makes you want to keep painting. Next up, don't be afraid to ask a question that may sound stupid because 99% of the time everyone else is thinking the same question and too embarrassed to ask it. This is the reason I make it a habit of answering every comment that comes up in my videos, the reason why I do a monthly Q&A. There's a lot to learn in this hobby, so much. You're not only learning so many rules of classical art, but also you're applying it through a two or three dimensional surface. There's so many different paints and brands and types and inks and washes and these things. This is alcohol based and this is enamel and this person said he was oils and these these person said these brushes are great, but no, they're terrible. There's so much. Whether it's the technical or the artistic, there's just so much to learn. And paired with the thing I previously talked about with enthusiasm. Don't ever be afraid to ask your questions. That's why I always try to be open and help people out and answer their questions. That's why we have the PMP, the Facebook group we have. It's all about answering questions because. Just when you have it, if you don't ask it, there's probably a bunch of other people who are sitting there in silence, not asking the same question. So speak up, ask your question, get them answered and keep going. Don't trust all purpose glue. This was a funny one to me that this one showed up on his list and shows that he's a probably somebody who is a craftsman himself. Yeah, glue is important. I don't know how many times I've seen people talk about horror stories of figs that were put together with. PDA or hot glue or something like that. The right glue for the right job is very important in this hobby. When I'm using when I'm doing terrain or basing, it's time to get out your white glue, your PDA glue. When I'm working on resin or metal, it's time to get out the the Loctite Ultra Gel Control. When I'm working with plastic, it's time to get out the plastic glue and so on. It's funny to me how much of my common hobby tools are just different kinds of glue. So get the right type of glue for the right job. It's a simple tip, but it very much applies to the hobby. So there you go. Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes. I couldn't believe how well this translated into the into the hobby. I think when you're somebody who is still learning, when you're early on your hobby journey and you look at things that are done by people you consider professionals or masters or whatever word you want to ascribe to it, people who are farther along on their journey. I think it's easy to believe that those people just did that thing that they literally just picked up the figure and went, OK, and I will execute plan paint one, paint two, paint three, glaze four, glaze five and done, completed next piece. That robot application run program. That's just not what it is. Every professional master hobbyist I know is just really, really good at pushing paint around and recovering from mistakes. It's just they keep going. They paint something on and then they fix it and then they fix that and then they fix a little more and then they add a little more here and then they change it here and then the adjustments get tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter. Until they reach what they're where they want to be. They put in the time and they correct their mistakes. When you look at somebody like Richard Gray or somebody painting on that level, you'll see sometimes when he posts his whips, he'll change things in between. And that's not because that was always part of his plan. It was because his plan changed. You realize he needed to adjust a color a little bit now that some other thing was in the piece. One of the things that makes teaching display level painting challenging is that there's not a direct road to it. It's not start at a execute step one, two, three, four arrive at destination B. It's. Start at a do steps one, two, three, realize two was wrong, fix it with four, fix, fix four with five, fix one again with six, go back, keep adjusting, keep glazing. And that's the that's the trick and that's very hard to film. So the point being that it's OK to make mistakes. You will make them. Everyone makes them. You never outgrow mistakes in this hobby. And that's a good thing because it allows you to continue learning and pushing and striving for something that looks like a more complete miniature. Next up, don't be the smartest person in the room. Hang out and learn from people smarter than yourself. Even better, find smart people who disagree with you. To me, this translates directly to something I know. Darren Latham talked about in his videos, which was. Don't be the best hobbyist in your circle, whether your circle is real or digital. Find people you think are better hobbyists and learn from them. And by the way, that doesn't mean you need to go find the best hobbyist in the world. In fact, that might be actually counterproductive. But find somebody who's better, who's farther along on their hobby journey than yourself. And learn from them. So if you have a friend, if you have a contact, if you know somebody online and you think they're better, or if you want to sign up for a Patreon and get that kind of learning, those are the right things to do because those things allow you to basically learn beyond wherever you currently are. It's pretty simple. You're never going to learn anything if you're the best hobbyist in your group and you're not learning from anybody who's quote unquote better than you. So seek out somebody who you see as better. However you define that, whatever you're aiming at, at taking the step into and do your best to learn from them to make something good. Just do it to make something great. Just redo it, redo it, redo it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them. I think this is more or less following along what I talked about before with redoing your with gracefully recovering from your mistakes. The anytime people, if you want a good miniature, the answer is just paint it. That's a good miniature. Any painted miniature is better than an unpainted miniature. It's that easy. If you want to make something great, then keep doing it. Do that technique that you're trying to learn over and over and over again. I tell the story all the time about a comic book artist. I watch, give a talk who mentioned that they were bad at drawing hands. Hands are a really important part of comic book art, obviously, because comic characters are frequently punching and grabbing things and pointing and being very expressive with their hands. So not being good at drawing hands is bad. And so that person drew 100 hands a day for 100 days. And by the time they were done, they were really good at drawing hands in all sorts of different positions and shapes and finger extensions and everything like that. This is the same thing. Whether it's on an individual piece and you're trying to get that that blend completely smooth or that piece of freehand just right, redoing it and redoing it and correcting and correcting and correcting is the key. But at the same time, if you're trying to learn some technique, if you're trying to go beyond to. Take your, you know, some you want to work with your non-metallic metal or with your contrast or with your whatever, it doesn't matter, right, then redoing it over and over and over and over again is the key. And being willing to stumble along the way is just a support. If you are not falling down occasionally, you are just coasting. I love this one. If you have no desire to take your hobby to the next level, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. If you're happy with your painting and you're painting what you like and it's making you satisfied, then you're good. You're super good. But if you're seeking after improvements, then you must fail. You must fall down. Because if you don't, you're not learning. If you're not failing, then you're not trying something new. And you have to be careful about how far you push yourself out there. When you're brand new and starting out, you don't want to, you know, well, I'm going to try this piece with NMM and OSL and da, da, da, da, da, da. I see this a lot. You know, somebody who is I painted six miniatures. I'm going to try a piece at night with OSL in all non-metallic metal. OK, maybe not. Probably don't do that. That's too much. Like it'll be my first time doing any of those things. Whoa. Whoa. That's like saying, well, you know, I run in my neighborhood every so often. So I think I'm going to do an ultra marathon. Maybe maybe work your way up to that first, you know, like, let's take a couple. There's a couple of steps in between there. Let's let's try. Let's try to build up to that. And so you can go too far. But if you're not pushing yourself, you're not failing, you're not trying those things occasionally, you won't grow. That's why when people always say, well, the answer to getting better is just practice. And I disagree with that because practice doesn't mean anything. You can paint for years and not improve at all. Because just painting, just practicing isn't doing anything. Deliberate practice, where you're trying something specific and often failing at the beginning is the first step to being, you know, kind of good at something. There's no limit on better. Talent is distributed unfairly. There's no limit on how how much we can improve with what we start with. Traverian and I recently did one of our myth busting episodes. If you haven't checked out that series, I would highly recommend so. I'll put the link in the show notes. Um, if you haven't checked that out, do so. But in there, we talk about the myth of innate talent and why I don't believe in it at all. Why I think innate talent is largely irrelevant. And it's because of what this says right here. There's no limit on better. Just because somebody happens to start more talented than you means very little to where you both end up. You can improve however much you decide you want to. If you're willing to put in the time, if you're willing to set up the learning track for yourself, if you're willing to invest in that deliver practice, you will improve. And ultimately, this isn't a hobby that's gated or capped or has an asymptote, a physical capability. You know, a man of my particular age and physicality, no matter how hard I try, I'm not playing in the NFL, right? That's just not going to happen. Maybe if I went back to when I was, you know, eight and got to start over, maybe. Who knows? But as it is now, no, because there's a very hard physical limit on something like that. But this isn't. This is much more of a cerebral hobby and it's much more about the time. And that's what's beautiful about this hobby is that it yields returns based on your investment. It's no different than anything else. The more you put into it, the more you will get out of it. So. Don't limit your own better. You can get wherever you want to get. Buying tools, start by buying the absolute cheapest tool you can find. Upgrade the ones you use a lot. If you wind up using some tool for a job all the time by the very best you can afford. This is a great piece of advice. This is why when people start asking me about an airbrush, I say buy a cheap one and I recommend them like a master airbrush kid because when you start out, you don't know how much you're going to like it, how well you're going to use it. Buy something cheap, learn its basics, break it. It's 20 bucks. It's not nothing, but if you break it, you can replace it. Don't go out and buy one hundred and fifty or four hundred dollar airbrush for your first one. I wouldn't buy a 16 year old kid. A new Mercedes. I wouldn't buy anybody a Mercedes, but you get the idea. Your parents ostensibly should not be buying you a Mercedes at 16. They should be getting you like a very cheap car that you can mostly pay for yourself that is safe and runs. Same rule here. And then as you go, you know, start with cheap brushes and stuff like that. As you go, buy some nicer stuff. I buy a few nicer brushes from my RAF 8404s or my Windsor and Newton Series 7s because I use those all the time. And they're my detailed tools and it's very important. I take good care of them and they're my, you know, those are my nice brushes. But I have a ton of crappy brushes that I keep around. I have super nice airbrushes, but that's after I went through multiple cheapies while I was learning and clogging it and being bad with the tool. So as you use it, you can upgrade and you'll be much better off busting a $20 airbrush or ruining a 50 cent brush. Then you are ruining a $350 airbrush or a $25 brush because you didn't yet know how to properly use the tool. Be prepared when you are 90 percent done and any large with any large project that they talk about a lot of stuff here, the rest of the myriad details will take a second, 90 percent to complete. To me, this translated perfectly into my experiences with competition and display pieces. The last 10 percent of the work on a competition mini should take an additional 90 percent of the time to complete. Let's make that real. Let's say you're nine hours into a display level piece, which that's a very fast display level piece, but let's just assume. The final details to actually bringing it up to level should be at minimum another nine hours. Now, the actual realistically, in my experience, it's probably more on the order of 20 to 40 and another 20 to 40, but every painter has their own speed. The key with producing work at that high quality level is spending just as much time on the small stuff, on the tiny detail, on the little things as you did on the big things that got you there. So there you go. Last one, and I think this is the most important one. Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be. Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe and a skill you can get better at. It's the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everyone else knows. This is the secret of miniature painting. Everything about what we do is beginning with the fiction of what could be. We pick up a box of tiny plastic pieces that we cut off of sprues and we glue together and we convert and we sand and we prime and we paint. It's all a fiction that we start with. It's on the front of every box, that completed painted miniature. That's the fiction of what could be. It's not when you open the box. It's just great plastic or resin or metal. But that imagination that what is here, that these component pieces can be something beautiful, can be something fun, can be art. Is everything wonderful about this hobby? This collective delusion that we all share to believe that we can take something that's just pieces and make it into something that is both artistic and our own. That it can be an expression of our creativity and also something we have fun with. That's a really wonderful thing. And in the end, that's what drives me every day with this hobby. Because it is a chance for us to all express our imagination to show our creativity and to make something artistic and then share it with everyone. This is a fantastic hobby we're a part of. The community here of people who paint and who engage in this. The people that I've met have become my lifelong friends. I value every one of them and every one of you. And I consider myself lucky every day that we get to do something. Ruled by imagination. Most of us don't do it for a living. Maybe we go to a day job. Maybe we do any of a hundred things. But for some portion of our day, we get to live our lives as we did when we were young. When imagination and the fiction of what could be was the determinative factor of who we were and what we did. So, with that, I hope you enjoyed these very much. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for staying with me for 250 hobby cheating videos. This has been absolutely fantastic. Don't worry. Yes, of course, more coming next week. We'll return back to normal hobby cheating content. But I really wanted to do this one this week to celebrate this milestone with all of you and to thank you specifically. Like I said, the article is linked down below. I would recommend to go read it. There's obviously a lot more than the 12 or so that I shared here. In fact, there's 56 more of them. And I found them to be pretty good pieces of advice. And so with that, I will say, as always, thank you so much for watching. Give it a like if you liked it. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating. We have new videos here every Saturday. But as always, I appreciate you watching this one and we'll see you next time.