Malewicz Designs

Designers vs shortcuts

How FOMO backfires and downgrades your skills.

Michal Malewicz
6 min readJan 24, 2024

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An image of a young man with mobile phones floating all around him

There’s this saying that to truly master something you need 10,000 hours of practice and some degree of talent.

Most professional piano players will agree with that (or even double that number)

It’s the same with athletes, writers and pretty much every creative field.

Design much?

Of course to get your first job as a designer you don’t need to be a full-on master-senior-empathy-strategist or anything like that. What I mean is you don’t need 10,000 hours to do that.

But you also won’t do it in 30 days.

the three step learning process

How learning (design) works

There are multiple books on that topic, including one that bears that exact title, but for the sake of simplicty let’s go ultra-high-level.

When learning design you have three distinct phases.

  1. Absorption — that’s when you read or watch about a specific portion of design and try to understand and memorise it.

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