Practice and Pushing Through

I have been busy the last three weekends creating something; A pair of speakers. There is a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from making something with your own hands. It is difficult to explain to someone who has never experienced it. The object itself is often secondary. Sometimes the thing you build is crude. Sometimes nobody else even notices it. But the process changes something internally. A small shift occurs between imagining and creating. Between thought and reality. I have always enjoyed tinkering. Thinking about possibilities, creating something gives me immense pleasure. It also helps that I am an engineer. Though truthfully, I suspect the inclination existed long before I could officially be called an engineer. Creating something does not necessarily have to mean a physical object, though there is something deeply satisfying about being able to touch and feel the finished product. A wooden shelf. A repaired amplifier. A clean solder joint. A small circuit board that lights up exactly as intended. But I enjoy writing code just as much. Small snippets of scripts that make day-to-day tasks easier. Tiny automations that save a few seconds repeatedly. Most people would probably not notice these things. Yet there is a quiet joy in watching a script work correctly after an hour of frustration. Particularly when it solves a problem that had been bothering you for weeks. It feels oddly personal. As if one has negotiated directly with chaos and managed to extract a small pocket of order from it.

The interesting thing is that none of this came naturally. At least not the skill part of it. The curiosity perhaps did; as a kid I loved breaking my toys apart to see how they worked. Putting them back together was a whole different problem that I wasn’t interested in. Important Skill picked - observation. That said skill is mostly repetition combined with failure. I can say this now after having made a truly embarrassing number of mistakes as I grew up. Bad carpentry cuts where measurements were somehow wrong despite being checked multiple times. Crooked joints that looked acceptable from one angle and terrible from every other angle. Soldering jobs that resembled melted metal accidents more than electronics work. Code that worked beautifully until the exact moment someone else tried using it. Entire weekends lost because of one wrong assumption. There is probably a mountain somewhere in the universe made entirely of my failed attempts. 

At the time those mistakes felt frustrating. Occasionally humiliating. It was more of self criticism - you can’t do such a simple thing ? These days  there is always someone on the internet building furniture that looks machine-made or designing circuits that resemble artwork. Comparisons now arise because one compares oneself to people who appear naturally gifted. What nobody sees are the years behind that competence. The invisible repetition. The ruined pieces. The accumulated mistakes. Practice has a strange effect on the mind. In the beginning everything feels difficult because the brain has not yet built intuition. You measure consciously. Think consciously. Correct consciously. Every movement is deliberate. Then slowly, almost invisibly, things begin to change. Your hands start noticing what your mind previously missed. You begin to hear when a motor sounds wrong. You can feel when wood grain will splinter before it happens. A solder joint starts looking wrong instantly instead of after failure.The mistakes do not disappear. They simply become more sophisticated.

As a child I was not particularly good at finishing projects. Starting them was easy. Finishing them was another matter entirely. Like said earlier I was far more interested in taking things apart to understand how they worked. My toys rarely survived this curiosity. Once opened, they entered some irreversible state where screws vanished, springs disappeared and mysterious leftover parts remained after reassembly attempts. Most never functioned again. At the time I think most adults in the house including Mum and Dad (to a lesser extent) considered this destructive behaviour. In hindsight it was probably the earliest form of engineering education I received. Curiosity before discipline. Exploration before competence. School projects followed a similar pattern. Grand enthusiasm at the start. Rapid decline somewhere in the middle. Half-finished models. Incomplete ideas. Concepts that sounded impressive but lacked execution. Looking back, I realise this phase is important. The world celebrates completed projects but rarely talks about the emotional difficulty of finishing things. Completion requires enduring boredom, repetition and imperfection. The initial excitement fades long before the work is done. The one project I distinctly remember completing was a small amplifier (7th or 8th Standard). Nothing extraordinary. By modern standards probably laughably simple. But when it finally worked and sound came through it for the first time, something changed permanently in my head. Until then electronics had been something Dad did and was magic. Suddenly it became tangible. Cause and effect. Components behaving predictably. Tiny invisible electrons somehow becoming music. That small amplifier probably put me on the path toward electronics. At the same time, a dear friend and batch mate whose ZX Spectrum I spent countless hours on probably nudged me toward computing. At that age computers still felt slightly magical. You typed instructions into a machine and it obeyed. Not always correctly, of course. But the possibility itself was intoxicating. I still remember the feeling of writing a few lines of code and watching something happen because of it. Even if it was something trivial. Eyes opened wide when it made graphs, solved quadratic equations. 

Perhaps that is the common thread behind all forms of making. Whether it is woodworking, electronics, writing or software. The transformation of thought into reality. There is also another aspect to this that becomes clearer with age. Building things teaches humility in a very direct way. Reality does not care about intention. Wood warps regardless of confidence. Blades will break. Circuits will fail regardless of optimism. Code breaks regardless of how elegant it looked at 2 AM. The physical world provides immediate and brutally honest feedback. And that honesty is valuable.

Modern life increasingly allows people to exist inside abstractions. Opinions without execution. Plans without action. Ideas without consequence. Making things interrupts that illusion. It forces confrontation with limitation. Your limitation. Material limitation. Time limitation. Skill limitation. Oddly enough this is not discouraging. It is freeing. Because once you accept imperfection as part of the process, experimentation becomes easier. You stop waiting to become “good enough” before starting.

I think that is why I enjoy crafts and engineering work so much. The feedback loop is immediate and real. You either built the thing or you did not. The shelf either stands or collapses. The circuit either works or releases the faint smell of burnt components into the room. The script either saves time or creates entirely new problems. And when something finally works after repeated failure, the satisfaction is disproportionate to the scale of the achievement. Outsiders often do not understand this. Why spend eight hours building something you could buy in ten minutes? Why debug a script for half a day to save three minutes daily? Why obsess over joints nobody will notice? Because the joy is not entirely in the object itself. It is in becoming the kind of person who can create it. That perhaps is the real reward.

Not mastery. Not perfection. Just the gradual realisation that mistakes are not interruptions to the process. They are the process.

C