To become accomplished at something takes hard work and practice, but issues of time and motivation aside, there is another problem: people only ever want to experience the finished result and an accomplished one at that. People may have passing intrigue into a scene that did not have made the grade in their favourite film or some early B-sides from their favourite band but no one is interested in hearing an aspiring musician struggle over the same bars in a piece of music time after time, piece after piece and so this usually stays behind closed doors. The people close to us can often be rather dismissive and sometimes thoughtless in their comments and jokes when discussing our ‘hobbies’ perhaps without any idea how important they are to us.

There is a big difference between having a try at something just for fun where any success at all is unexpected and the transition to taking something seriously where there is an expected level of performance by us personally or by others whether it is direct, implicit or even imagined. A big part of it, at least for me, is embarrassment and possible humiliation; music can be unfortunate in that it is usually very public to those who live with us but it happens with most if not all creative outlets since inevitably people are intrigued to see the results of what we have spent so much time on. Having others see or listen to what you produce KNOWING the amount of effort you have put in is really an act of faith especially since it takes so much time and effort to achieve a basic level of competence. I had someone once introduce me to her friends as “This is Mark, he’s a great photographer” which is quite a compliment in reality but I was cringing on the inside.

Others are also not likely to look at our results in the same way as we do. There are many many occasions where the photograph I take might itself be terrible but the lighting I was trying to get to work finally came off and I know I have figured it out to be able to use in the future or a concept shows great potential even though the execution was far from what is required. For me this would be a breakthrough while to someone else it may make little sense. Another example might be a musician mastering a particularly difficult piece made so by the time signatures that may not sound at all impressive to an average listener.

Lingering in my mind is often “but what happens if after all the time, learning, effort, money what I produce is rubbish?” Some people feel compelled to desperately try and explain the difficulties in capturing a photograph to try and mitigate possible criticism; we all seem to deal with this fear it in different ways.

Given all this, is it any wonder why for so many of us, certainly at the outset, our creative interests are so solitary and private or so many people are afraid to try?