An entrepreneur’s greatest soft skill : frustration tolerance
As a well-versed content creator that’s developed skill in many crafts like videography, photography and graphic design, I’ve realized that the most important quality to have in this industry is the ability to learn. Learning comes with tons of challenges and obstacles but one of my biggest breakthroughs in learning how to learn has been to come into a better understanding of patience, but more importantly; how to deal with frustration.
It’s no secret that learning anything can be frustrating. In fact, I would go as far as to say that frustration is inevitable. You’re taking in lots of information and attempting to understand it in your brain as you read or hear it. This level of learning is what I would consider scholarly learning. You read, understand and memorize via mental repetition. This is hard right? Well let me explain something harder, creative learning. When learning how to create art, you not only need to read, understand and memoize via mental repetition - you also need to apply.
This is yet another layer of repetition that surpasses mental repetition because this is repeated physically. The ultimate frustration tactic for anyone to give up and get upset. Think about it, what did you do as a kid to annoy your sibling or parent? You repeated things over and over knowing that eventually, they’d get mad.
Most people who aren’t in the creative industry don’t understand this. They believe that it goes from the camera, through this magical computer software and boom - done. New video, commercial, poster, script, etc. It’s that software though that most creatives spend the most frustrating hours.
I want to use video-editing as my example for this. In the world of video editing you can safely break down the learning process to a few categories:
Basic understanding of your preferred software (Adobe premiere, after effects, etc.)
Editing theory & psychology (pacing, color feelings, continuity, etc.)
Technique comprehension & application (masking, J-cuts, L-cuts, transitions, etc.)
Advanced technique comprehension and application (tracking, key-framing, etc.)
Mastering Industry-specific styles (the difference between a way a documentary is shot as opposed to a narrative feature film, etc.)
In this list only two out of five bullets are “scholarly” meaning that you just have to read, understand and memorize it all. The last three are all learned through application. Constant repetition, constant learning and constant application.
This is frustrating.
The thing about the final step (application) is that when you start to apply, you’re going to make mistakes. Over and over and over and over again. It’s purely trial and error. This can be extremely frustrating. One instance that stands out to me when attempting to learn and apply a technique in my career is when I was learning how to make key-framed masks. Here’s an example of what that looks like:
A post shared by TrinityTags Content Creation (@trinitytagscc)
To make this “invisible cut” happen within the software, you have to go through the clip you’re wanting to mask frame-by-frame and move the selection / mask over the span of the whole clip. This means:
Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat.
If your clip is 5 seconds long… only 5 seconds, you have to do that 120 times. Simply to help you understand, I’m going to paste this sequence of events.
Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat. Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat. Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat. Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat. Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat. Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat. Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat. Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat. Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat. Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat. Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat. Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat. Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat. Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat. Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat. Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat. Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat. Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat. Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat. Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat. Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat. Click → keyframe button → drag selection → go to next frame → repeat.
That was only 20 times. Imagine how annoying it would be to read that 100 more times.
THIS IS FRUSTRATING.
If you’re not in the creative space, I’m sure you’re wondering “why would anyone do this? Why go through that much trouble just for a split second effect?” Well this question is precisely what delayed me from learning this effect and many more. At the end of the day, I was lazy and didn’t think it was worth the time. So what made me push through the frustration and commit to not only learning how to do it and apply it, but do it extremely effectively?
Well, the answer is simple and I apply this to everything in life.
Being able to get past that layer of frustration and into the breakthrough is what separates the good, from the great. If I would’ve decided to just give up on all of the techniques that I know now, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I would simply be an amateur videographer with basic knowledge. It was the ambition of wanting to stand out that pushed me past the frustration, to build my frustration tolerance.
You have to force yourself through frustration in order to raise the bar of the amount of frustration you can take. This theory is the same that body-builders or just people who live a fit and athletic lifestyle use. They build their pain tolerance. They lift enough of the same weight to be able to lift higher amounts. They run 5 miles consistently in order to be able to run 10. This law applies to every avenue in life and I think it’s the foundation to growing in your craft(s) as a creative individual.
I encourage you today, whoever is reading this, to put time into that thing you’ve been procrastinating. That editing technique, or into that software that you’re too scared to learn. The quicker you jump in, they faster you’ll learn how to swim. Start building your frustration tolerance.
