The Will To Improve, How you too can succeed!

May 8, 201640 min read

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Published: May 8, 2016

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I think this is the most on-point, useful and important block of text I have ever written (and maybe will ever write, the only thing possibly better would be a rewrite of this years later). And I have written A LOT. So please, enjoy this, and siphon all the information you can out of my text, and the videos I linked, and you will not be disappointed. I am for the first time in 6 years on track with something in my life (ANYTHING) and it happened to be art, but all the information here is how I got here, why from this point onwards I will steadily be improving as an artist (and in other areas of life), and how you can do this too if you're having any problems (like for example drawing every day is something you just can't seem to do virtuously even if that was always the plan). So enjoy this, and make a decision right now to have possibly one of the more valuable reads of your life spending a few hours on absorbing all this (only 20% of english speaking people in the world could actually understand and thus use this, and to increase your odds of being that 20% you need to carefully absorb this for it to matter), or be lazy and ignore this. Your choice. Years down the line when this has all been more tried and tested (years instead of months) I will make another iteration on all the information contained here in one comprehensive video that I will hopefully get to as many people as possible, but for now, this is all I can muster. I assume the next couple of journals, if not most journals I write from this point onwards will be more exclusively focused on my experiences with drawing, whereas my talks of things like the below will slowly start to fade into the past. In other words, this might very well be the last journal I write on the subject of self improvement from this perspective, and if I do speak of it I am more likely to talk about how I was successful rather than how you can do this too, this is the result of my 6 years of repeated failures in the search of success, finally finding it in such a way that I feel like the last 6 years of search were definitely not wasted.

Willpower, a completely misunderstood mental thing'majug. It's amazing how much of it it takes to make every single decision you make, every single task you start performing, and how much it costs to just think at all.

Sycra's iterative drawing approach to learning and improving to draw as much and as fast as possible I believe is a spot on approach, more spot on than anything I've ever seen. Why? Because it focuses much more on the you than what everybody else is doing (including nature/real life). And I just found the perfect example of this, the worlds most sophisticated publicly known AI, alphago, an amazing AI developed by Deepmind, it beat the human world champion in Go, Go is the most complex game known to man claimed by some, and it's near impossible for an AI to guess all possible outcomes from the next move (or next couple of moves, which is required to be effective at go, there are so many possible outcomes you need to "feel" the right move rather than guess it based on the overall layout of the board) it is very much intuition based, something that AI so far has all been terribly bad at (as in hasn't had it at all). It was theorized to take at least another decade to get AI to this level, but it's designers were so genius that they managed to do it much faster than expected.

But what I'm talking about is how this AI learned (in the human sense of the word, it's a true learning capable AI) to be so good at such a brutally complex game, better even than the most trained and experienced human player. It learned to play by watching thousands of amateur matches online, once it was capable of playing the game like a human player based on that, it's designers assigned it a different task. Play against itself 30 million times. Playing both sides, learning how it was beating itself, seeing what it did wrong last time, reflecting on that and doing better next time. Which is basically exactly the learning approach used in Sycra's iterative drawing. And this AI is a good learner, a basic game like say Asteroids, if it plays it overnight (on a normal computer, not a supercomputer) it will reach superhuman level of skill by the next day. So there you see the potential maximum power this approach can give you (infinite level of skill within an infinite level of possibilities, maximum level of skill within a finite level of possibilities) if you want to see more detailed info about this AI. Look at this:

This approach is quite similar to what I came up with a day or two before watching

s video on this the other day, and I came to that idea intuitively (without thinking too much; it was just that as soon as I was visualizing myself doing the task, and trying to see me doing the task right in every single detail, it naturally turned into "see how I'm doing it now" and "how else could I do it?" and "would that work?")

It feels great to know that I could have reached the same conclusion as sycra on my own. It highlights the power of my mind when used efficiently, the ways in which it was designed and meant to be used, ways forgotten by today's materialist society (I mean an excellent example of this is the loci memorization technique; this is a SUPER efficient memorization technique that with minimal training anybody will be able to achieve, it was popular in the times of the roman empire. What happened to it? Materialists happened. To think we've gone backwards in education since the roman empire fell, haha.)

But that's not what I'm going to be discussing further, no what I will be discussing is the willpower required to act, and finish a given task. Let me break this down.

The willpower required to start any given task is a multiplication of it's difficulty level. Given example:

2 people of the same skill level (a low skill level, they're not good at drawing).
person 1 "Tomorrow I am going to draw a fully detailed drawing of a person with a beautiful detailed mountain range in the background!"
person 2 "Tomorrow I am going to draw 3 lines (S, C and I curve)"
next day comes
person 1: 100% chance of failure, 80% chance of failure to even start
person 2: 100% chance of success (if he starts) and 80% chance of success to start

Sure, for person 2 there is still a chance that he won't start, but it's only a 20% to the towering 80% odds of starting. These numbers btw are not taken from any research I've seen, they're haphazard guesses. But just ask yourself, just picture this yourself. Is this true for you? Do you have a hard time starting a task when you are bad at it or you know that it's gonna take you a long time to finish? Do you have the same hard time starting a task you know you can do with ease and it's only gonna take like a minute? Find the answer within yourself, and you'll know that I'm right about this. Feel free to even test the theory, you will further find that this is the case.

Person 1 and Person 2 were both me. Person 1 was me at the end of my first drawing month (which you can see here) I started an artwork, I couldn't finish it, not even close. I failed, I was let down, and I got discouraged. What happened? I didn't draw until 3 months later in june. I set too high goals then too, I got discouraged in early june, didn't start until late august to draw again, one and a half month later! and then what? Repeat, drew again september. Repeat, drew again december. Repeat, drew again April, repeate drew again may, repeat... Drew again the other day a FULL YEAR later. This is literally the last time I drew.

Failure leads to more failure because of the negative emotions that follow, success leads to more success because of the positive emotions that follow. There are more factors to this of course, but what would have happened if I had not set goals too high? if I had never been disappointed with myself? Would I have kept on drawing then? Yes. Would I have reached the levels I had hoped to reach by this point (after 2 years of drawing, I should be a pretty great artist by now by my original estimations) when I started out? Probably. Maybe even overshot.

So...

The first point on willpower: Think small, think easy, start there, and build up from there.

Here's a great video on subject.

The second point on willpower: preserving (and reserving) your willpower reserves

so that you have more of it to expand to make hard decisions or start doing harder stuff that may crop up over the day. This is relatively new to me, but I was already sort of aware of this, but from a slightly different perspective. I like this perspective more, but that's not to say I think it is more correct.

In short, every thought you make and every thing you give your attention to (even for a moment) drains your willpower. It drains your willpower to give your attention away too freely, it drains it more to re-focus your attention. Here are on-subject videos again.

So what is the takeaway?

Pre-determined routes that prevent you from needing to make decisions (you already made them) preserve your willpower in these cases.
How do you do this?

Well, let's go back to the self review again, ok so I am not doing the things I want to be doing, I don't seem to be able to start, or finish. Why? What is drawing my attention away? For me personally, I think through my regular day, what are the things that steal away my attention from time to time?

News (tech news in particular), I find myself often refreshing those news pages.
Youtube (a growing trend right now)
Social Media (although I have this under control)
Media (anime, tv, movies, etc; I have this under control as well by now though)
Daydreaming (About what I want to do with my various skills (from programming to art)) now this one is tricky, because over the course of the day it can actually keep me on target, but while I am executing tasks like drawing or programming, it can lead me astray. For example, I might be drawing gesture drawings, and my mind wonders off to figure drawing (like the more detailed stuff), or in a more extreme case, it can wonder off into what I want to program, and this sometimes kills my attention, my focus on the task at hand if I'm not careful.
Awaiting Tasks for example, just before I started writing this I did my gesture drawings of today, but I couldn't get into it because I kept needing to remind myself that I had a namegiving ceremony to tend to at 2 and I had to take a shower first within a good time span.

these are just a few examples. There are plenty of more, and more subtle things, but these are the biggest ones that I am noticing right now, so the first ones I should tackle.

How do I do that?

Well I notice that news, youtube and social media all fit under one frame. Browsing. So if I control my browsing (when and how I access my web browser) I have a grip on that. I already solved the social media problem by setting a hard absolute rule that I must not access social media from a computer (only from my phone) this helps because I hate touchscreen keyboards, and it also doubles as an effective tool not only to keep me away, but keep me from writing stuff I generally shouldn't be writing on facebook (I'm too open a person for the fucked up world of social media)

So I could cross 2 items off the list by setting some rules around how I use a browser, when it's ok to open a browser, and when not, or even having separate browsers for separate tasks (chrome for one, firefox for another, and chromium for yet another for example)

Controlling my daydreaming might seem more complex, but it probably has a very simple solution I will find later, it's not an out of proportion problem so I can live with it.

Again, same deal with awaiting tasks, for example these tasks I might be able to avert thinking about if I set things up so that I am automatically reminded of them when I need to be thinking about them (like a phone reminder or some such)

For you the set of issues might be a whole another list of things, so look at it from your perspective, find out what's distracting you, what's damaging (or even stealing) your focus on the things you should be giving your attention to.

As for my daydreaming problem which is pulling my attention away from tasks I am executing sometimes, I'll tackle that in this next bit.

The third point on willpower: how to keep your focus on the task at hand until it's finished.

This is a tricky one, because you should not need willpower to stay on target. It should happen naturally, and if it isn't that's a sign that you either don't completely get what you're doing or it is boring you so much that you want to be doing something else. This doesn ot mean you should gi ve up on it, there are a few ways to work on this but all of them are pretty tough.

1: Find the fun in the task. You need to be able to immerse yourself in the task so deeply that you forget for a moment the world around you exists, or else you will end up struggling.
2: Sink your mind deeply into the task. This is a broader topic, but for example look at Sycra's iterative drawing video, and there's one thing you will notice, it's that he says "Draw something, then analyze how you could have drawn it differently or better" and that is one of the keys, and I think that the ability to do this intuitively at one of the first times you do something is what talent truly is. Do talented artists draw less than untalented ones? No, they often draw more, they practice more, but they don't see their practice as practice, they're just drawing cus it's fun to draw. (and so the combination of 1 and 2 is what I believe to be the pre-requisite for "talent" or being talented in ANY thing, not just art. I'm a talented programmer, and analyzing that, I notice a trend since my first line of code, I experimented, I thought "what if I change the order in which this code is written?" or "What if I use a different statement than what the teacher recommended?" and pretty fast I raced ahead of all others in class in functional programming skill, and in all programming related classes (except CSS, that stuff bored the hell out of me), I was always like 5 steps ahead of the program because I had already tried everything people were trying to teach us for the first time! This is just one example, the best one I could provide). The more your flow (train) of thought is occupied with your current task, and doing it as well as you can, or better than ever before, the lower the odds of you becoming distracted and losing your momentum (and higher chance of your momentum only increasing over time).
3: Condition your mind to stay on target. There are various ways to do this, but the one I'm most familiar with is having a mantra. This is to constantly think something until it becomes subconscious (a sort of self brainwashing), pick a choice of words, like "back to work" or "am I doing what I should be doing?" (then if no, drop whatever you're doing and go back to what you should be doing) this helps you reclaim your focus on the task at hand, rather than allowing whatever is distracting you to keep you away from what you know you want to be doing. So basically, every time, your focus shifts, you think "Am I doing what I should be doing?" to reaffirm if you are still on track or if you've been derailed. If it's yes then great, move on, if it's no then you know you're hurting yourself and must stop, you must make it a habit to stop when you notice you're doing the wrong thing.

These are my 3 tricks for this, if you achieve the first two you will manage to "zone out" while you're performing some tasks and issues like say my daydreaming off topic disappear, because you get too immersed in what you're doing. For some people it might go to the extreme that they stop noticing what's happening around them entirely, they' are in their own world, and people would have to work really hard to break their attention (often people with ADD; and you know, you may be socially put down for this, or you may put yourself down for this, don't allow that to affect you into trying to "fix it" (if you want to, you can fix it) because you shouldn't, this is a very VERY good thing, it's a skill I envy you for if you have it. It's not "Attention Deficit", it's "Hyper Attention", you are so immensely focused that it goes beyond what normal people are capable of, and as a result, whatever it is you are so attentive to is something that you can understand better (or if it's a skill, become better at) than anybody else who does not have "ADD". Embrace that, take pride in it! Sure, there are drawbacks (you can be focused on the wrong thing in a moment, and thus you lose out on things, this can be particularly annoying in a school environment), but most of the negative talk about ADD is based on some idiotic people's biases towards it. Hone it, embrace it, channel it, control it! And you might be amazed at what you will be able to achieve. ADD is not a disease or some syndrome, it's a negative label over a gift that has been passed down to some people through evolution, it is probably here because of the rapid increase of distractions throughout society over the past millennium or two. But most intensely, the past century.)

The last point on willpower: When all has failed and your willpower is drained, you can reclaim it in small chunks

There are a few ways to do this, but regardless of which one you use, take a break from everything and be alone with your thoughts (Don't watch TV or sit in front of a computer, sit or stand somewhere alone, or walk somewhere. You're free to turn on some music, but preferably instrumental "background" music that won't distract you, and some music that you are very familiar with (you've heard it a couple times before, so beat changes won't come as a surprise) and what you want to do, is calm down these thoughts of yours, focus on not thinking at all to begin with. The most effective way to do this and the effective way to learn to do this faster is...

1. Meditation

This is your most powerful tool, the act of meditating passively replenishes your willpower reserves, and doing this alone can get you to a point where you have enough willpower so that when you stop meditating, you can have already made to decision "ok, now I am going to get back to this work I'm supposed to be doing".

2. Eat and Drink

You get (bursts of) energy from food and drink, I especially recommend fruits that may contain sugars (whole fruits, fruit juice is very fattening because it doesn't give you the fibers to make the digestion of sugar easier, which whole fruits do) and plants as mild, natural and healthy energy replenishers (and perhaps something to snack on while you're working). There are also many less favorable substances that do this, like caffaine and for some people sugar, and then there are drugs which I will never recommend (chief among them is amphetamine, but the drawbacks far outweigh the short term gains it can give, they are also unpredictable (for example people with ADHD will actually be drained by it as opposed to energized, this is why it is used in ritalin)). I recommend always rolling with the fruits and other natural foods for energy replenishment, otherwise as a fine alternative just eat any food and drink anything (sugary drinks will usually replenish you, and do so more than sugary foods like candy, but they are also more fattening so remember that). I do not recommend using caffeine or sugar heavy foods like cola, energy drinks and candy unless as a last resort, because what these will do is momentarily energize you, but after a while (depending on what it was) the caffeine will be drained from your system and you will be more drained than before you had the energy drink or cola. Candy and sugar is less severe but caffeine is a monster. For me drinking a monster energizes me for a full hour, but then that's it. Keep in mind these things (especially energy drinks) are addicting. Both caffaine is highly addicting as well as sugar in any form it wasn't found in in nature, but less if squeezed from fruits into fruit juice than other compounds (be warned though, most fruit juice isn't this naturally made, but luckily you can taste the difference, pineapple juice is the stuff man...) let me further clarify why you should never use amphetamine (energy drink is the sane alternative), while amphetamine is a more extreme option, and can keep you going much longer and much harder than any energy drink, it also has a much more extreme downward spiraling effect after your system runs out, and is highly addicting in a similar way but again, more extreme than caffeine. If you start, you won't be able to quit it very easily, and don't allow yourself to be fooled into thinking like an addict that "others are just addicted to it, I can quit it at anytime" that's not how things work. It also has short and long term damaging effects on your brain which especially an artist doesn't want (for an artist the mind is everything) so just.... don't use drugs, there are alternatives to my example drug, but all of them are just as bad or worse, it's a stupid idea and you get a small short-term gain for a huge and potentially long term loss later on, the price is far too high, both for your wallet and for your mind and for your very life. Alcohol has a similar story (it can lighten you up and make you care less about your work making it easier to actually do work, and with a small amount of booze in your system it indeed does help, but alcohol has many undocumented short and long term side effects that you don't want, and it also while lightening you up, drains your energy, especially when the alcohol wears off you will be extremely drained, so avoid this as well). Alcohol is a drug, fabricated by refining sugar treat it as such. Sugar is a toxin, alcohol is a (lethal) poison. Know this whenever you consume sugar without fibers (which breaks down it's toxins so you aren't affected by them) or alcohol (which has all the bad side effects of sugar, but even more very brutal side effects, not to mention it's even more addicting than sugar.) A less damaging alternative to alcohol would be cannabis or marijuana (weed) but it is just as addicting (if not more) and while in the short term it is less damaging, over long term it is just as (if not more) damaging. And don't listen to the crap about "derp, weed is not chemically addicting like alcohol" because... well.. games aren't chemically addicting either, they don't even give you a high, but people still get woefully addicted to them because like weed, they are psychologically addicting, and that is bad enough. Your mind (you, consciously and subconsciously) and body become addicted to alcohol, but as long as your mind is not addicted, you can control your body to overcome the addiction after some withdrawal symptoms, so chemical addiction (like in sugar) is just not as bad as psychological addiction. Which is why, again, stay away from drugs even if they're not "chemically addicting" and "you can quit any time cus they're not chemically addicting" (bullshit), weed is only a toxin (in vapor form) like sugar, but can be refined into a poison like alcohol (can be from sugar). And honestly, it's hard to tell if a toxin or poison is worse for you, but they are both bad for you.

And this is the extent of my knowledge of energy and willpower replenishment.

Feast your brain on information about why caffeine (be it from coffee or the more potent energy drinks and soda) should be a very very last resort.

There are many more interesting videos on this same channel about the various chemical effects of various substences on your brain. I am of the opinion that it is sane (as in ok) to use Weed from time to time, but only at intervals of more than 1 month between uses (extreme moderation) if you find yourself using it once per month, or more than once per month ythen you are using it too much (aim for at a minimum 2 month gap between smokes) weed can have positive effects, especially for an artist trying to be creative, but use with extreme moderation, and really know yourself "will this be addicting to me?" I tried weed only once personally, and very little, and I knew from the moment I felt the high that I would get highly addicted to this if I smoked more (maybe even from just one time) and therefore I personally will not risk it. But it could theoretically help you get over some obstacles like art blocks, however it is only a temporary solution at best, the real solution is sharpening your mind to be able to "get in gear" without the help of substances. So again, don't use drugs. The psychological addiction factor of weed is higher than anything I have ever tried (substance or action; yes, including sex), at least for me personally, so don't take any chances with it, the only reason I didn't become addicted to weed after smoking it once is because I have a very developed ability to just deny things, deny myself things. I wanted nothing more than to smoke more weed, but I knew the long term effects of it would be catastrophic so I said no. And recently I did the same for alcohol, last december I stopped drinking, permanently, even if I've been drinking on and off since 18. I just decided the detrimental effects greatly outweigh the benefits of it, and the risk of addiction is too high to take. It was relatively easy for me to just make an informed decision and decide "ok, for real, I wil never drink again" and since then I have turned down countless opportunities to drink, and when others around me are drinking, even if old habits tell me that I should have a sip, "taste it", I just deny myself that. I say no, I say no not to them, but I say no to me, and noticing the way I think around alcohol now that I've decided not to drink, I notice that I was already without knowing it both physically and psychologically addicted to it on some level, and thank god I quit while I was ahead, rather than after it would become a problem (because even if I was drinking at a rate of less than once per month, there was no telling when the frequency would go up). So don't do drugs, be better than that, avoid them not because you're told to, but because you want what's best for yourself. And if already addicted, it's never too late to make the decision to stop. But don't make that decision because others tell you to, make the decision because you realize that you don't want this anymore, and why you don't want it anymore, it has to come from your heart, and your mind, not somebody elses, that is the #1 pre-requisite for anyone to be capable of fighting against addiction, and coming out on top.

Away from the topic of willpower (back to art)

I noticed something, yesterday I was watching an

stream (long time no see) and I realized something in his drawing process that I liked, a certain mentality. Everything can be redrawn or everything is expendable, basically he never gets overly attached to anything he draws and isn't afraid to draw over it or even erase it completely if the need rises. I also noticed that his process of drawing is fundamentally different and more intuitive than what I usually see.

What I usually see: Stage 1 loose sketch, Stage 2 refined sketch, stage 3 clean sketch, stage 4 values/shading, stage 5 coloring, stage 6 highlights and refinements, stage 7 further enhancements (or some variation on this)
What Elsevilla seems to do: Stage 1 loose sketch, stage 2 redraw, stage 3 redraw, stage 4 redraw, stage 5 redraw... (until he's happy)

He doesn't invest in getting things right on first try, he doesn't invest in getting things right on 3rd try or the 5th, he just draws it until he's happy with it, and if he's not and doesn't know what to do about it, he puts it away, and then picks it up later (weeks, months, years) and figures it out.

There are so many things I admire about this, and it highlights some of his mental traits, one of which he points out quite frequently: "Love the process, not the result" he loves drawing the work much more than any of his finished works apparently. This also doubles as the single strongest motivator to draw and keep drawing, you enjoy the process, not what it gives birth to.

There are a lot of inefficiencies in this work ethic (for a human anyways, for a computer it's great, they redraw every frame 60 times per second (or more depending on your display's refresh rate) and algorithms designed to increase quality or sharpness of some renderings (like videos or games) may involve drawing each frame twice and then layering the work on top of each other (kinda like if you'd draw something, then copy it to a new layer to get rid of things like transparency issues or aliasing)) but I like that this sets an infinite roof on how well you can draw each drawing, how much you can improve on every work (basically until you run out of ideas or don't see anything wrong anymore). It also sets your standards for finished artwork much higher, which can turn into an obstacle, especially in corporate environments where you are more expected to work fast than well. It also means that each drawing will take longer than it had to.

But it also means that each aspect of every drawing, every corner, every object receives a lot more love than from artists who have a step-by-step process of going from loose sketch to finished image. It's a more free and fluid process; A lot simpler too. And the other thing I like about it is how it depends (heavily) on your self confidence and the faith you have in yourself. It is basically "I can draw over everything... because everything I have drawn I could redraw if I want to" whereas many artists (especially beginners) rely on happy accidents that "oh I don't know what magic I used but it looks great!" or "Wow that looks really great, I'd better be careful not to mess it up while I draw the rest of the image!". And I believe that this is the strong point. It reinforces ones faith in ones abilities, you never doubt whether you can draw well, never doubt if you could draw something you once drew again (or even better next time). And of course, it's also nice not to care too much about the result, you redraw and redraw and redraw and don't know how you could do it better, then fine, you've hit some sort of wall, work it out.

This process is something I want, and I think I will strive for, it will make drawing much more of a fun experience, because after all I am now doing this for fun and expression, not for professional work (even if it might by happy coincidence end up being used for that; I may need to create icons and some simple animations for a project I have).

There are some things I don't think I can appreciate from him though, like (direct quote) "if i describe my stuff, it would be a frankstein trying to be gentle to a girl"

That's a dark take on one's artistic abilities, especially someone who draws such vivid and lifelike stuff as him

Wonder how he can draw like that while he thinks like that

Anyhow, I tried this process, just now, and sure I didn't exactly improve, you know from bad to great (not that I expected that) nor did I get it perfectly right on first try (it's easier said than done actually), but I don't htink I've ever gotten this far in a drawing before, nor that I've spent this long on one that I wasn't really taking anywhere either, it's the first time I was drawing badly, and I allowed myself to draw badly in hopes that it would get better. and it did, it did get better, but it didn't get good. However if I had more mileage in drawing, I could have taken it to representable levels. If I spend the rest of the day on it even, I might.

One thing that is hard to grasp is the mentality shift from loving the process rather than the outcome. Enjoying drawing more than the sense of accomplishment after I finish a drawing, that's some tough mentality adjustment, although admittedly I was already halfway there (just by enjoying drawing more, because you know I'm not super inaccurate anymore).

I tried mixing these things I've learned with some other things I know, and this was the first attempt result:

The Progressively Polished Turd by Cestarian

For someone who hasn't rendered anything for 353 days, was never good at it, and always lamented how I was bad at it, I'd say I did a pretty good job returning to it like this without getting caught up in thinking too much about it. Judging by this, my rendering level is roughly the same as it was when I last quit, although admittedly my color and contrast choices were at a better point back then. It feels especially good to have gotten that far all the while not knowing at any point in time what the hell I was doing for the uhm... hour~ish(?) time it took me to do that. Honestly time just flew, I've never had this much fun drawing before, and I've never been able to space out while drawing this much, my mind always used to be flying from topic to topic while drawing, and trying to find the "correct" way to draw things, now I was just trying to find "a better way" to draw, and unfortunately didn't let myself get swept up in it more than this.

Each image was a copy of the point in time where I stopped drawing the last one, basically, I was drawing, trying to do everything I could, then there was a point where my mind froze and I couldn't figure anything out, copied, started thinking over again, and then found something, then repeat one last time. I could have kept doing this for more hours and possibly ended up with really nicely rendered irises, and possibly eyes (for example if I'd started over again I'd have tried making the eye whites NOT white and stuff) but everything else in the image was drawn about as well as I relatively know how to, I might have been able to do better eyebrows, slightly better shading, worked out better highlights, etc, but I would never have reached a major improvement because my greatest failure is in the anatomy, and my lack of knowledge of anatomy means that I'd have to redraw this for days to end up with something that's not a turd. But that's what the iterative drawing approach is exactly for. I just need to find a few reference images to work my own style out from, at least people drawing style. (I'm not into tutorials anymore, I like to see, analyze, further analyze, think of my own ways, etc)

Also, I had this great idea last night that I should try rendering a faceless head as well as I can, then once I'm satisfied, copy it over and try to fill features into it one at a time until I have a pretty great face. Then repeat, and repeat. It allows me to work on the hair (which I really want to do) before knowing particularly well how to do the rest of the face. (I don't wanna draw baldies until I know how to draw a good face and then practice hair

but if I draw the actual facial features, I cannot stand to look at how badly done they are which will distract me from working on the hair, also, what's the point of drawing perfectly good hair on a fucking turd?!

)

Bottom line here. All this stuff I just wrote, I am already putting into practice, and my mind might not be fully conditioned to perfectly utilize any one of the things I wrote above, it might only be 10% capable of each individual thing, but it is adapting and learning to do them all better, and better, and better, every day, slowly over time. And in a few months or years, I will be a master of all these things. This is where my newly earned patience is truly my greatest virtue, without it all of these great discoveries would end up in the wind, because I'd be giving up on them in a few days, or a week, which is just too short a time frame to fully and thoroughly test any single one of them.

If after reading this you feel starved for more, here are some complementary but slightly less comprehensive journals (some of these have videos from the above):

Patience: