Let me start with a confession: I’m a first-year architecture student, and yes, I have cried over a CAD drawing. Full-on, dramatic tears. In the middle of the night. Over a computer screen.
Everyone always asks, “What’s the best way to learn?” You hear things like: “Practice makes perfect.” “Repetition.” “Watch a YouTube tutorial.” WATCH A YOUTUBE TUTORIAL?
But here’s the truth I’ve lived, cried, and learned: the best way to learn is to mess up. Loudly. Painfully. Shamelessly. And then fix it. Whether in architecture school or in life, mistakes aren’t just lessons; they are the curriculum.
We all learn differently. Some are visual, others auditory, and some need to build and touch. But there’s one thing we all share: we learn by getting things wrong first. Think about toddlers, they don’t master walking through a PowerPoint. They wobble, fall, cry, and try again. Mistakes give feedback. Painful, yes. But precise.
As Henry Ford once said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
I’ll tell you the exact moment I realised this was true. It was my second studio project. My name might as well have been Elon Musk, because my focus was on perfection. I was buried in CAD, adjusting splines, aligning lines, tweaking lineweights like Michelangelo with a mouse. Days turned into nights. I was so obsessed with the drawings that I forgot the whole point of the assignment: to build a physical model.
The day before the review, I hadn’t even started. Cut to 3:14 am: I’m hunched over a foam board, ugly crying, knowing it’s too late. The model is rushed, rough, and falling apart like wet cake.
Presentation day? I had a flawless A1 sheet of technical drawings. Clean lines. Perfect section cut. But the model? Let’s just say toddlers would have done better. Did those CAD drawings save me? Nope. So I thought I had learned my lesson. Next time, I told myself, I’d focus on the model.
Except, I didn’t. The next project was a partner one. I told my partner, “You take CAD. I’ll do the modeling. That’ll fix it.” Guess what? It didn’t. Without doing the planning myself, I was disconnected. And now, I hated CAD too.
It wasn’t until the next project that something finally clicked. Instead of picking sides, I decided to do both one step at a time. CAD for a few hours. Then modeling. Back and forth between CAD and Rhino.
Suddenly, it worked. And that night, actually, I was in bed by 10 pm. Not 5 am. Not sunrise. 10 pm.
That was when I truly learned: you don’t avoid mistakes, you walk through them. Learning through mistakes doesn’t just improve your skills; it strengthens your mindset. You become more resilient. You adapt faster. You stop fearing failure not because you are the failure (just kidding), but because you realise it’s part of the process.
It’s like sculpting with wire: the first attempts are messy, tangled, and ugly. But each twist teaches your hand something new. Every wrong move leads to a better one.
So, what’s the best way to learn?
Don’t just read. Don’t just listen. Mess up. Get it wrong. Cry if you must. But then get back in and try differently. Because learning isn’t a straight line. It’s a spline in AutoCAD. It’s my collapsed model held together by glue and hope. It’s tears at 3 am and finally sleeping at 10 pm.
