01/05/2023
I dislike hearing the word “SELF-TAUGHT”.
“I’m a self-taught baker.”
No, you’re not.
No, it has nothing to do with grammar. Self-taught, for me, is when you acquire a skill on your own or taught yourself, without anyone teaching you. For example, “I taught myself how to edit my cake photos in Adobe Lightroom” means I figured it all out on my own. However, if I read guides, watched how-to edit videos then, I didn’t exactly teach myself, did I?
If you learned how to bake a cake from YouTube or a blog, someone else still taught you how to do it. Self-taught would mean you had no idea about baking, bought flour, eggs, sugar, butter and salt and figured out how to magically turn these ingredients into a cake, by yourself. If you learned from a Youtube tutorial, that person still taught you. I find it a bit disrespectful to the person who took the time and effort to prepare a free tutorial for the public to learn from and generously share her knowledge.
You’re not self-taught, you’re self-learned.
When people ask me how to be good at anything, I tell them self-learning is not the best way to go about it. It’s a slow process, you waste a lot of time, you lack the foundational knowledge or often you find gaps in your knowledge because you have no idea what to learn or where to find it, and you have no one to correct your mistakes, leading to misinformed beliefs. Ever heard of the “Dunning-Kruger effect”? It’s a cognitive bias whereby a person’s lack of knowledge and skills in a certain area causes them to overestimate their own competence. A good example of this is when I had an assistant over the pandemic who has been baking for some time, self-learned. She was so confident in herself that she didn’t bother asking for my help or clarification when doing a task I assigned. She wasted 6 recipes of vanilla cake batter because the told me she already knew how to measure, turned out she learned wrong. Six recipes gone to the trash. It could have been avoided had she only asked me. Another girl tried to make buttercream. She learned from a video but told me she knew how to do it. I was doubtful, but let her do it to prove something. I just observed her and as expected, the buttercream failed and was beyond saving. She cried. I told her “This is why you should always ask for guidance if you didn’t receive formal training, because what you learned on your own could be wrong. I don’t need overconfident people in my kitchen, that’s how you fail.”
Do yourself a favor, save and invest in the right education and learn from experts in their fields. It doesn’t necessarily have to me, anyone with the professional training and years of experience in the industry. There are so many out there. It saves you time, money and the headache of failing multiple times. Lastly, be careful of the content you consume on social media platforms, not all tutorial videos out there are giving the correct information or teach the proper techniques.
- J
