Don’t Let the Tutorial Teach You What to Imagine

Toss the manuals, solve the creative problem first.

People often ask me how I learned Photoshop.

The answer usually surprises them.

I didn’t.

At least not the way most people do.

I never sat down with the manual. I didn’t work through tutorials from beginning to end. I opened the program and started creating.

If I wanted something to happen, I kept pushing buttons until I figured it out.

To me, software has always been a puzzle, not a class.

One day, while experimenting, I accidentally created an effect I couldn’t reproduce. So I called Adobe technical support.

“I’ve got a strange question,” I said. “Can you tell me how I made this?”

There was a pause.

Then the support technician laughed.

“Actually… can you tell me how you did that?”

That was one of my favorite moments.

It reminded me that creativity doesn’t come from knowing every feature in a program.

It comes from having an idea and refusing to let the limits of the software stop you from finding a way to create it.

That is exactly how I approach AI today.

I didn’t begin by studying everything AI could do. I dove in.

I brought it real problems, real ideas, and real work. Then I learned how to communicate with it by experimenting, adjusting, and trying again.

Sometimes I give it the wrong direction. Sometimes it misunderstands me completely. Sometimes the result makes me laugh.

But every attempt teaches me something.

Working with AI feels less like operating a machine and more like learning a new creative language. You have to figure out how to describe what you see in your head clearly enough for the tool to help you build it.

But the idea still has to begin with you.

I don’t ask AI to decide what I should create.

I start with the problem.

What am I trying to communicate?

What emotion am I trying to create?

What business problem am I trying to solve?

Then I use AI to help me explore, refine, visualize, and sometimes push the idea further than I could have taken it alone.

That is the same way I have approached every creative tool throughout my career.

I don’t learn software for the sake of learning software.

I learn whatever I need to solve the problem in front of me.

That distinction matters, especially now.

If you begin by asking a tool what it can do, you may end up creating only what the tool already knows how to show you.

But if you begin with imagination, curiosity, and a problem worth solving, the tool becomes something much more powerful.

It becomes a creative partner.

The best creative people I’ve known never waited until they understood every tool.

They had an idea first.

Then they made the tools catch up.