When I was in school for audio engineering, I had a professor that I loved. He was basically a stoned rocker that managed to convince the school he knew a thing or two about recording music. I’ve got an old CD of his laying around somewhere, dude was a hell of a guitarist.

One afternoon we were in the studio, and he was teaching us about using effects like compression, EQ, reverb and things like that. The thing about using these kinds of effects, especially something like compression, is that it’s hard to hear the impact of it when you turn it on. Like bass guitar in a mix, you don’t know it’s there until it’s gone. So, as a result, it’s hard to know how much of the effect to apply to get it just right, so it “sits” in the mix the way you want it to.

He told us something like:

To make it easier to learn how much to apply, just turn it all the way up to 10, so it’s completely stupid, then back it back down until it’s where you want it. It’ll be easier to hear it this way than starting low and turning it up.

This was immediately pragmatic and impactful. As a junior audio engineer, it absolutely made it easier to hear the impact the effect was having, and turning it down, not up, was the easier way to find the right mix.

I think learning new skills and workflows is similar. Take AI, for example. If you dabble in AI here and there, you’ll never likely get to the aha moments you need to push you out of your workflow comfort zone. You’ll never come up against big problems you have to work your way out of. You’ll never get to experience the very obvious “whoa that’s too much” moments that help you set boundaries.

But, by turning it all the way up, by jumping in and overcorrecting, and using it too much, you learn the boundaries, learn where it’s stupid, and get to a better, more productive mix with your existing workflows. Eventually, you need to turn it back down, and work it into the mix, but overcorrecting for a little while is a fast track to getting really good, really fast, with this new way of working.