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Speaker: Finn
So, I’ve got to tell you about one of my absolute best friends, Alex. He’s just one of those people who’s incredibly independent. If he wants to learn something, he usually doesn’t look for a teacher; he just tries to figure it out himself. And a perfect example of that is when he taught himself to play the guitar during our first year at uni.
Alex has always been obsessed with rock and indie music. So one day, totally on a whim, he bought this beaten-up, second-hand acoustic guitar from a classmate. At the start, he was completely out of his depth. He didn’t even have the foggiest idea how to tune it. But instead of getting lessons, he decided to teach himself. He spent months watching YouTube tutorials, looking up chords, and practicing whenever he had some free time.
The main reason he did it was simply because he loved music. He wanted to play some of his favorite songs himself. I remember hanging out in his dorm early on, and it was pretty rough. He’d play a chord, pause for a few seconds, and then fumble his way into the next one. But he kept at it, and after a few months, something seemed to click. He could play entire songs and even started writing a few of his own.
Looking back, would it have been easier with a teacher? Probably, especially at first. A teacher could have corrected his technique and helped him avoid bad habits, so he might have progressed faster.
Having said that, learning independently really suited him. He could work at his own pace and focus on music he genuinely enjoyed. So, while a teacher might have made the process easier, teaching himself made the achievement much more satisfying. He knew he’d earned that ability through his own effort, and I think that sense of achievement kept him motivated.
Speaker: Blondie
I’d have to go with my best friend, Maya. We’ve known each other since high school, and she’s always been the type of person who gets a random idea in her head and just runs with it.
About two years ago, she decided to teach herself digital illustration and 2D animation completely from scratch. At the time, she was working a pretty dry administrative job, but she’d always loved visual storytelling and felt like she needed a creative outlet after work. Hiring a private tutor or enrolling in a formal design course was way out of her budget, and she couldn’t commit to rigid class schedules anyway. So, she basically turned the internet into her personal classroom.
She started from total square one—learning software like Procreate and Adobe After Effects entirely through free YouTube tutorials, online forums, and dissecting process videos from artists she admired on Instagram. Her room basically became a studio; every evening after her shift, she’d spend hours practicing linework, studying frame-by-frame movement, and rewatching clips at half speed to figure out how certain visual effects were done.
Looking back, would it have been easier to learn from a teacher? Technically, yes—a mentor could have pointed out her mistakes early on, given her structured assignments, and saved her from weeks of painful trial and error. But honestly, for Maya, I don’t think a traditional teacher would have worked as well. The fact that she was in total control of her own learning kept her genuinely passionate. She wasn’t grinding for a grade or following a rigid syllabus; she was just bringing her own ideas to life. That freedom gave her a level of intrinsic motivation that a structured course rarely provides, and today she actually takes on freelance illustration gigs on the side.
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