Behind
The
Scenes
Aka 98% of the time
Trust the Process
As long as the process is something you've created or adopted as an extension of your own will. A lot of academia, unfortunately, is trusting a process you don't understand and hoping it will lead to some promised result.
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Results are messy, and quite often not what we hope for; but an unexpected result is rewarding when the process has integrity and in-built enjoyment.
A Good Time
You don't want your only good time to be your final studio presentation. Every little moment; every note, sketch, draft, or trial is a chance to do something valuable: valuable because its enjoyable or new or unusual (risky?), thats when real learning happens - thats what you remember decades later.
Your Process is your own
With the sheer amount of hours we collect in studio; why regret wasting those hours to mind-numbing, repetitive, box-ticking tasks that you can't imagine needing in the future. Your professor doesn't have to understand why you do what you do; in the end, at the final presentation, you get to explain why you did what you did. And all the little notes and drafts and sketches can be evidence of moments of excitement and growth and learning that nobody else could manufacture for you if they tried.
So don't trust the experts?
Sure, trust the experts, but first acknowledge what they are experts in, and what they aren't. Nobody is an expert in how you learn and grow except you; and the sooner you learn to reclaim that freedom, the firmer your grasp on life will be. Chaos stops being troubling, instead it becomes interesting, and sometimes refreshing; confusion becomes a sign of approaching learning curves, instead of doom.
And don't lose yourself obsessing about usefulness. The usefulness of things is always subjective; but everything can have a purpose, or an intention; and a wide variety of intentions create an interesting and multidimensional project. Even you as a person are made of a variety of diverse and sometimes conflicting purposes; though they rarely unify for anyone, at the very least they can be understood. Like listening to your unconscious, that sort of thing.
