I want to make something perfectly clear. When I wrote my post about male stubbornness, I was talking about other males, I was certainly not talking about myself. Despite what my wife may think, I’ve always considered myself to be very reasonable.

See where the skin pokes through the clothing

That is until this week, when it was made painfully clear to me that I do have some stubbornness issues. I was working on pictures for my story, Gathering Herbs, and the clothes were not fitting properly. When working with Poser this happens more often than I’d like to think but usually I can play with the size or manipulate the character so you don’t see the places that skin is poking through. In this case, I spent about an hour and realized I was getting nowhere.

Dark admission here, I often buy reference books and training videos that I know I need but I never get around to watching. My reasoning goes something along the lines of if I really do need the videos I already have them.  This makes it very easy for me to ignore them. In this case, I went back to my videos noticed that and they had one video specifically on my subject. Five minutes later, I knew how to take care of my problem and realized that I had spent over forty hours this last year trying to take care of this issue when watching a five minute video would have eliminated my struggle.

Five minutes later, no pokethru

I could try to convince myself that this was a “one of” issue. After all, I’m the person who always reads the manual. I enjoy reading well-written manuals. Unfortunately, I tend to read just enough to do the task I want to do and I stop. If I’m putting together a bookcase or a desk, this technique works perfectly but when I’m trying to learn a complex piece of software I need to rethink this strategy.

Poser is a very complex program. I have been using it for over a year. I would like to think that the quality of my compositions shows that I’m improving. The compositions I’m trying to do for my story are at the limit of my skills and I’ve encountered several problems this week. Each time the same set of videos that I’ve had for almost a year showed me what to do.

Now I have a quandary. Is it male stubbornness that causes me to continue trying possible solutions without consulting the training? Is it engineering arrogance to believe that I use a complex program without training? Is it possible that I suffer from both conditions simultaneously?

Fortunately for me my wife has provided guidance in this situation. She says I suffer from massive cases of both conditions simultaneously. Well, that’s not actually what she would say to my face but she has helped me understand my behavior.

If I had watched all the training videos last year when I bought them, I would’ve already forgotten everything that I don’t use on a regular basis. Last year I did not know enough about Poser to understand the videos on advanced subjects. This year not only did I understand them but I was able to put those advanced concepts to use immediately, thus ensuring that I would not forget them.

Acquisition of knowledge does not ensure retention of knowledge. I would also add that acquisition of knowledge is pointless without the foundation to make that knowledge understandable. I felt compelled to add that last statement simply because I deplore the current trend in education of making you memorize facts without the understanding that goes along with those facts.

How many times have you had a problem only to have someone say do this, do this and finally do that? You have no clue what you just did nor do you know why. The next time you have the problem, do you hunt the person down again, hope you can remember an arcane sequence of keystrokes or try to resolve the problem on your own to gain a better understanding of the problem?

No matter how many training videos I buy, they are useless to me until I have the background to understand the concepts and a need to use those techniques. In that case, maybe I wasn’t being stubborn or arrogant, I just wasn’t ready for the knowledge.

Fortunately my wife is always ready to provide a grounded perspective for me. As she put it, that excuse might work for one or two hours of wasted time but thirty eight of those hours were pure stubbornness.

Wardrobe Malfunctions

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