Avoiding Kits

Choosing your own adventure when it comes to your own, personalized Getting Started arsenal makes for the interesting set of constraints that shapes your own experience.

establishing your own personal constraints early on — and codifying those constraints in the tools that you choose to get started with — becomes the earliest seed of originality in what might become an incredibly fruitful hobby or path to skill development.

Just to wrap this up and give a bit of a TL;DR: we are shaped by our introduction to skills in rather nefarious ways. The getting started kit is the worst way to get into something because it takes us down a path of likely mediocrity, and doesn’t encourage us to pick up the tools that fit our skills and interests as we discover what those skills an... See more

Getting Started is a journey, not a package.

The getting started kit is a commoditization of the journey towards having skill around a practice. It provides you with the artefacts of that practice, but not the points of reference around which those artefacts take on meaning and contribute to the practice itself.

it’s perhaps better to learn through doing small and easily discarded projects that don’t lock us into one tool path. We’ll accrue tools and knowledge along the way, and those tools will better reflect our interests in the thing itself.

The problem with the commodification of the Getting Started pack is that it locks you into a popularized and predictable model for getting into a hobby or domain — and maybe not one that reflects your needs as a creator.

When you’re first learning about something, there’s a fairly dangerous period between your desire to get enmeshed in the thing and acquiring enough knowledge to understand how different tools act together. During this period, you might be tempted to get cheaper equipment or, worse yet, find a getting started kit. Never, ever buy a getting started k... See more