I've recently started having a renewed interest in the ability to create some form of digital art, either through painting/drawing or 3D modeling, and I'm noticing something of a big problem with my approach to the whole thing: patience. I know these are difficult things in which I have no real experience to speak of, and I'm completely unfamiliar with the tools and as such have a difficult time with actually making my thoughts come to reality, yet despite this I notice myself getting very easily frustrated and basically giving up just after starting because the whole way to completion just feels so unfathomably large as to be impossible to overcome. It doesn't really help that even were I to have the experience and knowledge on how to use the tools, I'm not convinced I have the artistic skill to actually create something I would be satisfied with—though I suppose that might be something of a problem to most artists even, themselves being their biggest critics.
I'm also noticing how it's sabotaging me a bit at the moment with language learning, which I know is a process that takes a great deal of time due to having gone through it before, yet at the same time due to how slow progress inevitably feels while doing it my motivation is again somewhat waning. To be fair, in this regard at least it is not new, and it tends to wax and wane as time goes on and I notice either how slow progress feels or I notice some situation where I can make use of my newfound skills and thus reinvigorate my motivation.
I know that the right approach to deal with these things is probably to break up the problem into more manageable chunks, and learn those one at a time, always building on the foundation of the things that I have learned before; but when those things aren't directly enabling me to do something new that I want to do, it is really hard for me to have the patience of learning something I can't directly make use of or need. Perhaps another way would be to simply do as I have done many times with programming: starting with a clear goal, looking up how to do the pieces as I go along, and then ending up with some sort of amalgamation of different guides and approaches that I can refine once I'm further along and know better what I am doing and how.
Yet even with programming, even for things I already know how to do, I am finding it somewhat difficult to actually do them because while I can envision the end goal and the steps to get there, I am so focused on what I want it to be in the end that I'm not really interested in taking the road to get there. I know it's the journey and not the destination that matters, and once I manage to get started I do tend to enjoy the journey as well, but starting is just always so difficult. Perhaps, with programming at least, that is actually the problem, that while the journey is the part that I enjoy, because I already know so well the steps I need to take embarking on it doesn't feel so meaningful making it difficult to do so? If that is so, why then do I also have these difficulties when starting new things where I don't know all of the steps? Or perhaps I do, I just don't know how to actually do them even if I know what I want to achieve in theory, and that is what frustrates me.
This matter feels more nuanced than I thought when I started writing, and perhaps "patience" isn't the right word for all of this, but it did enable me to start this exploration, and maybe one day I will find ways to work around or along the ways my mind work to achieve the things I want to achieve. But for now, I think this is enough.