Indeed. Also, nobody posts their failures online. You only see success, and the path to that success is hidden or even misrepresented (“I made this in an afternoon!” ... and 5 years working 8h/day on the necessary skills).
I've started to make a conscious effort to post about my failures on Twitter specifically to help address that a bit, especially when they're hilariously bad (e.g. crashing a model airplane 3 seconds into its flight). Naturally, I've been failing at doing this consistently :)
I'm starting to find that people making posts about their failures offer me more value than people who post about their success. Reading them usually helps me be less hard on myself, and also sometimes provide insights into how to avoid such pitfalls myself in the future
That is 100% what I'm going after! I screw up all the time, figure out what I did wrong, and iterate. No one ever sees the 37 steps that went wrong before the successful outcome.
Reminds me of this (dubious) Picasso story:
"It always reminds me of the story about the woman who approached Picasso in a restaurant, asked him to scribble something on a napkin, and said she would be happy to pay whatever he felt it was worth. Picasso complied and then said, “That will be $10,000.”
“But you did that in thirty seconds,” the astonished woman replied.
“No,” Picasso said. “It has taken me forty years to do that.”"
Apocryphal or not, the point of the arduous and often frustrating process hiding behind the product is relevant to any skill.
Definitely! It's understandable to want to hide the 99 crappy things you did before the 100th that came out looking good. What's more, a lot of us actively go back and scrub the failures from our history.
It's stupid, but I'm guilty of it too. I am trying to catch myself, though. It's easier to be more candid once you start having a bit of success.
