Don’t Study Seamless Work

TLDR: Instead of studying work we think is perfect and “seamless”, we should study work that’s only a step or two ahead of where we are, because our ability to see its “seams” gives us a deeper understanding of how it’s constructed.

Okay, so maybe I should say don’t only study seamless work.

Learning from the best¹

Whatever your creative discipline, you’ve probably heard the advice to study “the great works.”² Masterpieces of literature, painting, and film etc. are considered “masterclasses” in the form.

And I don’t disagree.

But…

I don’t agree completely.

Studying work you see as perfect has several benefits:

Dig into why you love what you love and it can…

• refine your taste
• help uncover what resonates with you
• reconnect you to your source of passion

Which is all valuable and valid.

But I think sometimes we (speaking for all of us here, hi 👋) get caught in thinking that our learning material sets the ceiling for how good our own work can be. This sets an undue pressure to choose the right things to study and enables our pride.

Learning from the worst

We create a false dichotomy: either something is perfect or we have nothing to learn from it. We begin to tell ourselves we’re too good to learn from certain things and miss out on important lessons.

Dig into why you don’t like something you consider bad and it can…

• teach you what not to do
• help uncover what doesn’t resonate with you
• remind you that creating is a difficult process

Learning from the “seam-ful”

So yes, I think there’s something to learn from work we see as both seamless and barely-held-together-by-a-single-thread.

But the sweet spot lies in between.

In Steal Like an Artist, Austin Kleon advocates stealing from our inspirations by stealing the thinking behind their work. I think the problem with seamless work is that things that are expertly executed appear effortless. The thinking is hidden. So how the f do you steal it?

It’s far easier to get into the head of someone around your level of expertise. Study work that’s close enough to where you are that you can see the “seams”. When you look at stuff that’s a step or two closer to where you want to go, the technique is visible enough for you to dissect how it’s executed but it still inspires you to grow.

You learn a lot from the seams. The seams show you how something’s constructed.

Footnotes

Footnotes

1. ”Seamless”, “Best”, “Worst”, “Good”, and other merit-based qualifiers are all incredibly subjective terms, so just hold that in my your mind while you read, so this post doesn’t develop an “infestation” of scare quotes. ↩

2. Which often refers to a Western canon that is predominantly straight-cis-white-man focused, but that’s a whole other conversation (or several). ↩