Technique requires discipline.

This cat is inspired by Maria Popova's review in Brain Pickings of Janna Malamud Smith, An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery

The work grows as our minds (conscious and unconscious) and our bodies would have it grow. Technique may require discipline and set the order of things, apprenticeships may demand periods of subordination, but the imaginative acts that propel the effort are themselves serendipitous. In your garden you may set out to clip the roses, but you notice a weed you want to pull from among the coreopsis, except that first there is a rogue branch to be snipped from the holly shrub—and on and on until dark finally settles, ending your day. An occasional task has to be done just now and just so.

Technique requires discipline.

(photo by Michael Day at Flickr)