Gary Bloomer | SHAKING THE TREE # 340
This passed Sunday, I made Barn Brack. It’s an Irish tea bread. I used my grandmother’s recipe. I’ve never made this before and, if I do say so myself, it turned out pretty good.
Now, does this make me a baker? No. Far from it, in the same way that spending close to thirty years designing museum exhibitions made me a designer.
Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to writing.
When I first started writing website and its articles, I was embarrassed to call myself a writer. I’d written very little and had no readers. Much like creating design in a museum, no one handed me a manual for the work because there wasn’t one.
Every gallery, every case, every sightline problem was its own small crisis, solved by doing the thing badly at first and then doing it less badly the second time.
That’s the part nobody tells you about expertise: it isn’t downloaded. It’s assembled, badly, in public, over many, many years. One mistake after another.
I think about this every time I see someone online asking which course to take before they start writing.
Which certification.
Which book.
As if the right sequence of inputs will finally grant permission to begin. I understand the impulse — I’ve felt it myself, plenty of times — but I no longer believe it.
Preparation feels like progress. Usually it’s just a well-lit form of procrastination.
Design school teaches you principles. The studio floor teaches you truth. You can understand color theory perfectly and still watch a display case wash out under the wrong lighting rig, in front of a client, on installation day.
That failure taught me more in twenty minutes than the lecture that preceded it taught me in a semester. Not because the lecture was wrong — but because the public failure was mine. I had skin in it. I had to fix it, on the spot, with the materials at hand.
Writing turned out to be no different, which surprised me more than it should have.
I came to it late, after decades of visual work, assuming the transfer would be smooth.
It wasn’t.
The only thing that got my sentences into shape was writing badly, in volume, in public, twice a week, — which is exactly what my newsletter has forced me to do since 2023.
Every issue is a small exhibition install. Some lighting rigs still wash out. I fix what I can and I ship it anyway, because the deadline doesn’t wait for the draft to feel ready.
Here’s the part that took me the longest to accept: you cannot think your way into any sort of skill. You can only do your way into it, and thinking is what happens during the doing, not before it.
This isn’t an argument against study. Study matters. But study without practice is a rehearsal with no performance, running forever, never opening.
At some point the curtain has to go up, whether or not you feel finished rehearsing.
I never once walked into an install feeling fully ready. I walked in anyway, because the exhibit opened on a date I didn’t control, and the work taught me what the reading never could.
The people I’ve watched actually get good at something — writing, design, ghostwriting for executives who’ve spent careers avoiding a blank page — are not the ones who waited until they felt qualified.
They’re the ones who kept publishing, kept installing, kept shipping the imperfect version, and let the gap between what they made and what they meant close a little more each time.
That gap never fully closes.
Mine hasn’t, after thirty years in one craft and several more building a second. But it closes enough to be useful, and it only closes if you’re standing in the work, not circling it.
Start before you’re ready.
Readiness is a story you tell yourself to delay the only thing that actually teaches you anything: doing it, wrong, and doing it again.
As always, thanks for reading.
—Gary
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Next time on Shaking the Tree: Facing an unpleasant situation
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Originally from the U.K., Gary Bloomer is a writer, branding advocate, marketing specialist, and an award-winning graphic designer.
His design work has been included in Creative Review (one of the UK’s largest design magazines). Since 2009, he has answered over 5,000 marketing and business questions in the Know-How Exchange of MarketingProfs.com, placing him among the top 3% of contributors. He lives in Wilmington, Delaware, USA.