Patience, practice, discipline

So we want to learn to do something new. Here I talk about photography, so let’s stick to that topic –– but really, this could apply to many other activities.

As I was saying, let’s imagine we want to learn doing something new, and we really put ourselves to it. We watch a couple tutorials, we read some articles, we acquire the tools and we start trying.

After a while we notice the results are not as good as the ones others are achieving. What is wrong? Questions start flowing in our minds. Our ego gets in the way: it can’t be we are not as good as them. And we are also putting all these efforts into it! So what else can it be? Why aren’t we as good as the others?

Our modern societies have a clear answer for this: it is because we don’t own what they do, of course. The others are better because they use better tools. Or maybe just different tools. The difference is not in us or them, it is in what it’s used.

So we watch lots of reviews, we acquire as many tools as we can, copying what others use, trying to own what they own or even something better if possible.

After so much time spent sitting in front of a screen, learning about what is better and what they use, we are ready to finally get there where we want.

And yet, nothing changes. The tools are not improving our results. We keep spending money, buying new stuff, selling what didn’t work, and we are still stuck into the same unsatisfying location we found ourselves into at the beginning.

I am sure many of you can relate to this. It surely happened to me multiple times in the past. No matter how much I rationalised this situation, it kept coming back and I always had to fight it.

To be honest, it is not our fault. We live in societies that are built on acquiring. We are constantly exposed to marketing built for identifying what we want to do and make use feel as if we don’t own what we truly need.

If we listen to YouTube (the biggest offender, as with many other social issues) we are bound to think we don’t own the right camera, the right lens, the right lights, the right software, and so on.

You use Premiere Pro? Tough luck, pros must use Resolve. You want to do street photography with a Canon? Are you serious? Everyone knows you need a Fuji or a Leica. And don’t get me started with “film look”! You must own an old CCD sensor camera for that. And throw away Lightroom, because Capture One is what will make your colors really shine. But really, forget about Capture One, Lightroom has so many new AI tools. And don’t you own this lens? Everyone shoud have it if they want to bring their photos and videos to the next level! And on and on.

I will use a recent personal experience for closing this article and get to the point.

Recently I have become more interested in video. To be honest, video has always been my passion, aAnd now I want to go back to it and develop that passion to see what good it can do me.

At some point I realised using the iPhone is nowadays a decent solution for exploring video creation on the go. It is fast to use, it has quite professional apps, I can often edit right on the phone, image quality is more than enough for most of the situations I encounter, and many other advantages.

My problem was with the stabilisation. The iPhone has very good stabilisation, but it was not as good as I wanted. I found some apps with additional stabilisation, such as Camera P3, but it was still not as smooth as I wanted, especially with some specific movements. So I started looking at gimbals.

Now: gimbals are an extremely popular topic among incluencers and tech reviews channels. There are countless Chinese makers putting all kind of gimbals on the market, with attractive prices and an ever growing set of features. Should I mention the most obvious one? AI, of course!

I watched lots of reviews and bought my first smartphone gimbal, a Zhiyun Smooth 4. I followed a couple of tutorials and it seemed the perfect solution at the time. Still, using it didn’t bring me the results I wanted. I tried to walk as a ninja, balance and calibrate my setup, and generally follow all the advices from popular channels that deal with gimbals, with not much luck. My videos kept looking unintentional, with weird angles and fragmented movements.

Of course my gimbal was not good enough! So there we go, more video reviews, and after hours the truth was finally revealed to me: I needed the insta360 Flow! Everyone was saying that was the best gimbal for phones, it was so small, practical, easy to use, feature packed! So I ordered one.

Guess what? Results were kinda the same. I started getting mad, because I did throw more money at this quest, with no noticeable improvement. I discovered a couple of channels where the creators out together beautiful videos using the iPhone and the DJI Osmo Mobile… could it be that was the gimbal I needed?

At this point I had two epiphanies.

First of all, I understood that what creators show is not their average output. It is their best output. Even better: it is their best output after being polished. We can’t really know what the creator did for accomplishing a result. Maybe he did 10 takes before getting that exact smooth movement, and maybe he still had to apply some software stabilisation to it, and possibly crop it in a way that hides the warping caused by that.

The big lesson in this case is: don’t compare yourself to others in a straight, naive way. Always keep in mind that creators only show their cherry picked, absolute best work, after having polished it. While we see all we create, all our attemps and failures.

We must keep this in mind always and learn how to pick the best of what we do, polish it, and only then (eventually) compare it to others’ output and to the goals we set to ourselves.

The second epiphany was this: no product will automatically and easily give us what we have in mind. In my case, no gimbal can give me a reliable and smooth movement that perfectly aligns with my ambition and vision.

There are no magic tools. What makes the difference is the technique. And acquiring the technique requires patience and lots of practice. One thing is to try doing the ninja walk, another one is to actually be good at it and accomplish its benefits.

Beside that, on a side note: the ninja walk is not always the optimal solution. Different body types and situations require a specific approach at compensating the walk. Walking straight and toe to tip is often a better solution. It all takes practice and patience. Watching a couple of video tutorials won’t do it.

Similarly, there is difference between knowing what a gimbal does and its features, and learning to actually use these features for accomplishing what we want.

Buying is not the solution, and yet that is what is being pushed to us. YouTubers make a living promoting pseudo solutions for problems. The latest gadget, the latest software. But these are indeed fake solutions, because they don’t address real problems.

A serious reviewer should always say: buying this product won’t improve your output unless you put a lot of effort into mastering its use, and at that point you could probably have used an inferior or simply different tool, because the most important thing is how skilled you became, not what you bought.

But that would ruin their business model, so they will instead continue to promote sensational thumbnail images and messages, presenting each new product as the perfect solution that will change everything.

No, that product won’t everything. It will change nothing. Unless we change how we use it.

Patience, practice, discipline: that is what will change everything. No matter what we want to do, no matter what level we want to reach. And guess what, these three things are free and already within us.