Chapter2: Explore

LEVEL+ : UNLOCKED NEW TIER

Figma had such a profound impact on my son, it unlocked so many possibilities. His first project after wallpapers was character art to a custom T-shirt that he could sell for 1 Robux in the Roblox game store.

To make his first project unique, I offered to sketch it.

3 objectives

• He and I would brainstorm and work on ideas together
• The designs from our collaboration were not for sale.
• Positioning had to be relevant and current.

He agreed, and we worked on some character ideas. With the onset of a pandemic, we watched a video of a doctor journal his experience with COVID-19. After that, my son was inspired to design a superhero doctor. We sampled characters from Dr. Strange to "The Medic" ( TFT2, the OG field medic IMHO). We decided to keep it simple and landed on a doctor's surgical glove crushing a virus. 

He tried to upload it to Roblox, and the upload failed. Something to do with "Hashing and text legibility." I looked in the docs and the community. Couldn't resolve it for him.

Bummed out, he started exploring other things to make, so he can pay for the next 30 days of his new Roblox subscription. He decided to make a "Dominus" hat.

What is that you ask? It is an artifact your character can wear in the game, and that thing has sold for 7,100,000 Robux (that's ~$25K), I'll let that sink in. I asked if he knew how to make it, and he replied, "no." Turns out, the only way to create custom artifacts in Roblox was to import meshes.

The next barrier was Blender, an open-source 3D design studio. He saw an intro video and said it was too complicated. I told him how I worked on Maya Studio back in high school and insisted he give it a try. He downloaded Blender and watched a youtube video on how to use Blender to import custom meshes into Roblox. With learning on a computer being this now normal, selling a course with a formalized learning structure was a breeze. Udemy runs a flash sale and boom, we are now in business.

Before getting started he asked

"Was hard for you when you started learning this in school?"

I replied

"Only until you beat the first hump, then its rinse and repeat!"

It's been roughly 2 weeks of watching him culturing a habit, sacrificing 60 mins of iPad/game time in favor of learning Blender. During the first few lessons of the course, I concealed my excitement to his outputs, just cheering him on verbally.

This was his output following a guided set of instructions down to the T.

2 days ago, he caught me out of nowhere. As the exercise for completing chapter 1, the instructor suggested: "build something around you."

He recreated his desk and with some fantastic fidelity.

Besides the Dominus, he has planed to recreate his school diorama project in 3D and submit it to his teacher as his "Shelter-in-place project."

Conclusion

Learning by compliance yields so poorly in contrast to meaningful learning, that is so much more sticky. Learning that stems from a curiosity about what is possible rather than desperation. To the audience reading this here, spend the time, and understand how to enable growth learning for yourself, your team, or organization. Companies invest millions in training and re-skilling employees. Been there done that, and its effectiveness is lukewarm (IMHO). A saying I tell my boys, friends, and team with any grand endeavor they decide to take up; "20 men can drag a horse to the lake, but none of them can actually make the horse drink unless the horse wants to!"

When you couple passion with purpose, you get opportunities to discover, fumble, and explore!

Until the next chapter, stay safe and keep learning.