Watching the best won't teach you to build

Pocket edition. This is a shorter version of a longer article; you can read the full edition when you have more time.

You look for ideas for your house, end up watching a cathedral put together by someone with twelve years of practice, and close the game wanting to build less than when you opened it. You'd done exactly what every guide recommends.

The psychologist Albert Bandura described how much of what we learn we learn by watching others, and added a detail that almost never gets quoted: seeing someone achieve something only raises your confidence if you see yourself as similar to them. When the model is too far away, watching stops informing and starts measuring, and what it brings back is the distance.

Hence a counter-intuitive rule: the best teacher is almost never the best in the trade. It's someone just ahead of you, whose work still shows the seams.

Perfect advice about palettes and corners doesn't fix this, because the block isn't one of technique: it's one of expectation.