How to Draw an Owl

One interpretation of the image and caption is that it illustrates how some people mistakenly perceive the progression from novice to expert. Namely:

Stage 1: You suck.
Stage 2: You're an expert.

In fact, mastering a skill involves hundreds of stages of incremental improvement over a very long period of time.

I believe a key reason so many people on the road to mastery call it quits is not because drawing a beautiful owl in pencil is superhumanly hard. It's because they thought it would be easy.

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Another reason people quit somewhere between Stage 1 and Stage 2 is because they don't see the incremental progress along the way. In certain learning expeditions, like learning how to play basketball, you see continuous improvement in real time. Every day you practice, you get better, and you see yourself getting better, so you're well motivated to persist. In other learning cases you only see occassional quantum leaps of improvement -- the leap happens after hours and hours of invisible incremental improvement that one day push you over a threshold and all the different micro-skill parts suddenly come together to form a workable overall skill or ability. Chess is an example of a skill learned in quantum leaps--you start as bad, and eventually after much practice, you one day become average, without many visible steps in between.

(image hat tip to Alexia Tsotsis)