When I'm Happy, I Play Better

YouTube has my number. Just as I want to go to bed, it starts showing me videos of Ronaldinho playing football. If you’ve never seen him play soccer, you should. Or you should not, as you will lose a lot of time you could be drawing!

His skills were out of this world. It’s just stunning to see his moves. A real magician on the field.

And then I saw this documentary-style video of him, The Winger Who Spent Every Night Partying And Still Destroyed Everyone.

At first, you feel sad. Ronaldinho had such talent, but he partied hard throughout his life, which affected his fitness and his opportunities in the sport. He’d gone even farther in the sport if he had been more disciplined and trained harder like the other soccer players. Or so you’d think.

Until you look closely. At one point, he is quoted as saying he plays better when he is happy. Also, note that he is always smiling on the field, enjoying himself.

For him, it was play! It was always play. Fun. He wasn’t practicing hard; he was playing. Notice how he humbles his fellow soccer players with his insane out-of-this-world moves, casually passing the ball through their legs or lopping it over their head, and he’s already gone before they even realize what happened.

He became that good through play. Fun.

And in that sense, his partying fits. He always made sure he enjoyed himself as much as he could. Why would he change that? It had served him well all his life. At his top, he was probably the best soccer player in the world.

Not because of discipline, but because of play. Fun.

He had gained these skills through play in the first place!

If he’d been as “disciplined” as the other players, maybe he wouldn’t have become as good at playing soccer as he eventually became! The way he dissed his opponents was just fantastic to watch, and you can see that came from pure play, from pure messing with opponents for thousands of hours on the fields for years and years.

Imagine doing something and enjoying it so much that you get energy from it, keep going, and keep going.

My coding habit is like that.

Imagine your drawing practice was like that. Forget about drawing boxes forever, forget about the discipline. Imagine drawing being so much fun that you can’t stop, and you become as good as Kim Jung Gi, the art equivalent of Ronaldinho.

It sounds obvious that you should be disciplined to become good, but there is evidence that another route might be better, or at least as good: instead of practicing hard, “party hard”, have fun.

Can we blame Ronaldinho for partying hard? For making his life the most fun it can be? Isn’t that the type of life we want to live?

Shouldn’t we be more like him? I don’t mean the partying-hard part of it, but shouldn’t we be making sure we enjoy drawing more than practicing hard and all that discipline?

Something I do occasionally is make cartoons for an artists’ society’s newsletter. They have very steep stairs to the society, and members are getting older; they are considering alternatives to the stairs, but there are no good options. So I decided to draw an alternative that didn’t make it either.

These drawings are not as skilled, but! I have a lot of fun making these!

Is it that bad to let go of your skills a bit and prioritize fun! Do we keep proving our skills, or can we just let go of that and prioritize playfulness, like Ronaldinho did?

Becoming or being a good artist also eventually becomes about continually proving to people that you have the skills. I know I had that with programming; do I really need to keep proving that I am a good coder? Maybe Ronaldinho had that, too. Perhaps he grew bored of demonstrating his skills and chose fun nights out over admiration from others while on the field.

Sometimes, I think I should follow Ronaldinho’s lead and “party hard” by drawing cartoons.

This Week

I have the website’s user experience on my mind. Per the above article, how can I make drawing practice more fun and less like an army drill?

The philosophy used to be that you would go to the right page, and it would suggest a drawing exercise you could do now. But it didn’t even work for me; I’d eventually leave the Morning Sketches APP to go onto Pinterest to find something to draw. My podcast player suffers from the same mistaken thought; it chooses a podcast for you to listen to.

We don’t work that way. We look around to find what we want to draw, what we want to practice. We like to choose, we like to feel inspired to do that thing.

I imagine it is how Ronaldinho, discussed above, would have trained. He probably didn’t do the disciplined drills the other players did; the adults made them do. He just had playful fun trying to figure out how to humiliate his opponents as much as possible with his swift leg moves, which he must have decided to practice on a whim and then kept practicing until he had mastered the move.

So now there is an option to choose a category of images you want to practice in the Morning Pages APP. Now you can just practice heads, or hands, or primitive forms, et cetera, if all you want to do is practice just that.

Also, regarding the user interface, I don’t quite like where AI is going; the LLM models are trying to become the “head” of the internet, the place you land to find anything, and they may lead you to websites for specific details.

For example, many of you search for 3d cube models. Imagine AI capturing that request and presenting you with a 3D model of a box inside your browser. Great. But you weren’t led to my website, and you didn’t discover the other variable 3D models available.

This has been going on for a long time. You can order a book on Amazon, but walking through a bookstore is still a different experience; you discover books you like that you didn’t even know existed, books that are unrelated to what you were searching for. Amazon will not do that. They will show you similar books.

You lose that serendipity, the possibility of finding something new, surprising, amazing.

If you search for a 3D cube now, you’ll likely find my website and all the other resources on it. Soon, if you search for a 3D cube in an AI, it will present you just that cube, right there inside the browser. AI tends to do the absolute minimum it can get away with, so it won’t show you more than the bare minimum. It might not even present you with a variable 3D cube.

With this article, I am rebelling. I have a buffer of articles to be sent out that Google has already indexed, and I used to append new articles to the end, but now I am inserting them here, messing up Google’s indexing of the website. Is that a bad thing for me?

Professional Search Engine Optimization experts are still trying to get the website they work for found and understood by the algorithms, because that is what they do. But couldn’t doing the opposite of that also be a good idea?

Many websites are trying to find ways to get noticed by AI, but as Rory Sutherland said, “The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.” It may serve me better if AI models struggle to understand my website and only know it in general terms, so they can send people to it instead of summarizing or simulating it.

Search engines have complained for a long time now that they don’t understand my 3D model pages because there is no text on them. I am not about to add text to the pages for algorithms to understand! Google is sending people to the website anyway because it is noticing that people now spend 8 minutes on average there! You are using the resources to practice drawing! Thank you! So while Google doesn’t quite understand what I am offering, it has detected that my website provides value, so it is directing people to it.

And maybe that is for the best.

It may be good that Google doesn’t understand my website.

The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.

Not making your website easy for search engines to index can also be a good idea.

Tying it back to the main article, having fun playing soccer rather than practicing hard and discipline may also be a good idea.

And drawing cartoons instead of practicing hard can also be a good idea.

Yours sincerely,