Learn anything: A decade of becoming a creator

I had this idea more than a decade ago. It wasn’t a business idea. It wasn’t even fully an idea — more like an itch. A feeling that the way I was trying to learn things was wrong. It was powerful enough that it dragged me through skills I’d never planned to pick up: photography, traditional drawing, digital painting, writing, graphic design, UX and UI, front-end, then full-stack development. I wasn’t a prodigy. I didn’t take ten courses or find a mentor. I was just stubborn. And somehow this stubbornness, once pointed in the right direction, became my teacher. This is the story of how that happened — and how a handful of projects ended up teaching me more than a decade of school ever did. If you’re in your 20s, this is for you. Here’s how to make the next ten years count in ways formal education never could.

The rough start

Let’s rewind about ten years. I was in university, doing terribly. Not because I was lazy in the ordinary sense, but because I had no interest in the field I’d chosen. That disinterest turned into resentment, which turned into a sort of numbness. I smoked weed every day. Played Dota 2 all night. Drank on weekends. Eventually I failed out.

5.3k hours of Dota 2 in two years — basically a full-time job. Plus all weekends 💀 I wasn’t some misunderstood genius. I was just a young adult in bad shape, skinny and tired, newly dropped out, fighting off nicotine and THC addiction, wondering what the point of anything was. The one thing I had going for me was a strange kind of determination. If I decided to do something, good or bad, I did it. If I decided to get stoned, I got stoned. If I decided to do something obviously stupid, I’d still go through with it. That same stubbornness, for the first time in my life, became useful. I decided to go home, apply to a different university, and give myself six months to get my act together. And there was plenty to get together, without exaggeration. When my parents heard I wanted to be an artist, I wouldn’t say they were unsupportive, but they definitely didn’t share my optimistic perspective. Let me show you an artwork from that time — it explains a lot.

But then, just as I planned I’d go home and get my shit together, I did. Within a week I’d quit weed, quit gaming, quit drinking, and sketched out a routine:

breakfast at 8
1.5 hours of workout
2 hours of traditional drawing
lunch
3 hours of digital drawing
a couple more hours of working on something creative
dinner
finish up paintings, whatever was left

It was a whiplash change: from wasting almost every second to trying to squeeze the most out of every hour. And it worked, up to a point. My art improved, slowly. I even got a little recognition online, which mattered more to me than I liked to admit.

In six months I filled several sketchbooks and produced hundreds of digital paintings. I was still an amateur, but my progress was finally visible.

The showreel I applied to university with

Planting the first seeds

The first real project was The Divided Soul. It wasn’t a course exercise or a random sketch. It was a set of fantasy illustrations that I thought of as one world, one universe.

“Having a named project changed everything. It gave my practice a spine. I wasn’t just drawing; I was building something.”

These artworks were made between 2016 and 2018. The progress was visible with each painting: my compositions, use of color, brushwork, and attention to detail all improved. I went from colorful, cliché pieces to cinematic artworks with a more distinct style and story.

Shortly after the Divided Soul came Daydreamers — portraits of girls in trippy, hallucinated states. I was still practicing anatomy, still studying references, but the project gave it a vibe, a reason.

Those pieces blew up far more than I expected. One post hit the front page of 9gag with twenty thousand upvotes. Pinterest kept resharing it. I’d meet strangers who’d say they’d already seen my work online.

It never became a real audience or a business, but it was a spark. More than the attention, it proved to me that my weird routine was working. Projects gave direction to the practice.

The slow realization

By the time I got into the new university I’d already been through several projects. I showed up ready to learn, but pretty quickly realized that in the creative subjects I was far ahead of the class. That wasn’t arrogance. I’d just spent hundreds of hours on the stuff they were teaching as “introductions”. The program moved at a pace meant for beginners. I’d been forced to learn faster because I had things I wanted to make. That’s when the pattern started to become clear: it wasn’t talent or luck. It was the projects. A project isn’t just a task. It’s a self-assigned, encapsulated entity with a purpose. It connects different skills — drawing and storytelling, design and code — and that connection forces you to learn in context. That’s what schools and courses often miss. They try to teach you skills in isolation, but without something to apply them to, they slip away. During my university years, we've been taught:

Camera settings
Print design
Typography
Music production
3D
Vector graphics
Projection mapping
Post production

But without a clear arc, it was just a random pile of unrelated skills. What you learn for an assignment doesn’t stick. You pick up a few hotkeys and shortcuts, but since you’re not actively using them, the moment you hand in the project the knowledge fades — and you’re left with a few meaningless tutorial pieces. Whenever I could, I folded my own projects into the assignments so I wouldn’t spend time on things that didn’t matter to me. I was obsessed with optimizing my time and improving as fast as I could, so working on tasks that didn’t fit my goals felt like a waste. Even for the one-off assignments, I tried to combine different skills to get a more rounded outcome. For a 3D assignment, I didn’t just model a static object — I composed a low-poly music video. That way I learned not only 3D, but also compositing, post-processing, sound design, and even a bit of creative direction.

A random assignment became a real project: three months in the making, 30 camera angles, and over 1,000 layers in post-production.

The Journal of the Universe

In my final year I signed up for a course called Product Design. I assumed it meant industrial product design — I had dropped out of that years earlier — and I thought I could show off my old skills. Instead I discovered a new discipline: the combination of UX, UI, and research. It turned out to align far more with the things that had fascinated me as a kid: making websites, building things online. I got a job as a junior designer soon after. For a while I lived a double life: design from nine to five, art from five to nine. I swore I’d never trade art for design. But then something unexpected happened. One evening, slightly stoned — the old vice returned once in a while — I was hit by an idea: The Journal of the Universe.

I even had a headline in my head:“Across the universe, events unfold. In the same instant, thoughts arise.”

Elia gasps for air. He closes his eyes, hoping he wakes up of this madness. But it just doesn't happen. "What are you? Where am I? Why did you bring me here?!" he asks helplessly, awaiting for a response in vain. "I must be going crazy... Give me an answer already! I want to know what's happening!" he continues.— Sagittarius A*, 2020

It wasn’t just another art series.It was a concept that would pull together everything I had ever learned.

From illustrations to writing and photography, all showcased in a custom-built web platform. I had never built anything like it. But that’s what a project does: it pulls you into uncharted territory and makes you pick up the tools you need along the way. I started building. I streamlined my day-job workflow so I could finish my design tasks quickly and spend the rest of the day coding. I taught myself enough backend to wire up a store. I implemented print-size previews with slick animations, connected Shopify and Printful, built multi-language support, added comments, notifications.

A few years earlier I had failed a programming course. Now I was coding entire features because the project demanded it. And, to my own surprise, I loved it. I was doing everything — creating the art, writing the content, managing the store, developing the platform, running the social media. The only way to manage that as a single person was to plan deliberately and move small but steady. No big launches. Just one addition after another, day after day.

20 hours of work. 42 views. I often talk about the lack of feedback and recognition my work has received — not because I’m bitter, but because it’s hard to grasp from the outside how deep these projects went. I want to make it clear: if I had been chasing the wrong goals — money, impressions, recognition — I would have quit long ago. But I didn't. I kept creating paintings, publishing blog posts, implementing new features. For three years. Every day. Consistently. Even when it felt like nobody was watching.

Scaling the idea

The Journal kept growing in ambition. The infrastructure — the site, the store, the features — was outpacing the content. I wanted to recruit other indie artists, to fill the universe with more stories and images. Around that time TikTok was overtaking Instagram, and many artists were frustrated by Instagram’s push toward video. I started wondering if the Journal could evolve into something bigger: a new kind of social space for artists. That idea became Creatillo.

I’m still a little proud of how it looked. A friend once said it’s better than many VC-funded startups today — and it hasn’t had an update in four years!

But ambition only gets you so far. I ran into the two classic walls of building a social platform:

the network-effect dilemma: nobody wants to use a social network until everyone else is already there
the monetization gap: it costs a lot to get people there before you can make any revenue

I couldn’t break through either wall. Creatillo never took off. It’s still online, like a frozen time capsule of that chapter. For a while the failure stung. But in hindsight, Creatillo was one of the most valuable projects I ever did. I learned to think in systems, to ship things, to understand the invisible problems that sink big ideas. Those lessons later let me build similar things a hundred times faster with AI.

Once UI

After Creatillo I was exhausted. I didn’t want to touch code again. I focused on design at a new company and thought maybe that was the end of my building phase. But apparently a creative needs a challenge to stay sane. I came across a popular Figma kit called Untitled UI. As someone obsessed with design systems I found it frustrating: too many redundant components, not enough reusability or consistency. I kept thinking about how to do it better. That thought became Once UI.

Recent screenshot of the Once UI landing page

Once UI then vs now It started as a Figma kit. As a business it was a failure, but as a project it taught me a lot about monetization. The obvious next step was to turn it into code. I couldn’t find a co-founder willing to build it the way I envisioned, so I did it myself. The stack was Next.js and React. The design principles came from all those years of trial and error with Creatillo and the Journal, but were refined for real-world use. That’s how Once UI for Next.js was born. It became my most visible project, and it finally made me understand the pattern that had been there all along.

What projects really teach

Looking back at all these years — the paintings, the Daydreamers, the Journal, Creatillo, Once UI — I see the same pattern repeating. A project gives you direction and urgency — a timeline, a reason to care, a reason to keep going.

Continuity can turn anything into a project

A good project:

has a clear purpose, even if it’s small
has a scope that you can describe — something you can build or make
can start small and keep expanding as you learn
pulls you into skills and fields you didn’t plan to explore

You don’t need a subscription or a course to start one. You don’t even need a mentor. You can start by describing your idea to ChatGPT and asking what you need to know first. Then you build. The project itself will show you what to learn next.

Projects, products, and fuel

Some projects stay personal. Others grow into products. The difference isn’t just quality. It’s fuel. To keep a project alive long enough to become something significant, you need resources — time, energy, sometimes collaborators, often infrastructure. Sooner or later that means revenue. That was one of the hardest lessons for me to accept. You can build something excellent, but if you don’t figure out how to sell it, the world will treat it as a hobby. A project that becomes a product gives you the fuel to keep going.

Closing the loop

Almost every skill I rely on today came because a project forced me to pick it up. I never sat down with the goal of “learning programming” or “learning UX.” I just needed them for something I was building. Projects evolve. They merge, split, sometimes fade, sometimes return as something new. They form a loop that carries you forward. They aren’t just the way you learn. They are the living proof that you’ve learned. To me, that’s what matters most: waking up and learning something new. I don’t care about impressions, I don’t calculate ROI, and I don’t give much thought to anything beyond that. Because everything beyond what you truly need is a status game — and status games might be the strangest invention we’ve built a society on. But that’s another story. For now, I just want to share that being a creator is a beautiful journey. While many people look back and wonder what could have been if they had talent, a creator looks back and thinks:

“Look at the work I’ve done. And there’s still time to do more.”

That, to me, is the quiet reward of creating — the sense that the journey is still unfolding.

This story shaped not just how I work, but also the things I make. To mark the launch of this piece, I created a small drop of products — artifacts I’d want on my own desk as reminders of the journey.

Risk makes the plot tee

Hurth 6 Desk mat

Sagittarius A* paper print