As far back as I can remember, I was told I would grow up to be an artist. By age six, my obsessively detailed renderings of Mechagodzilla, et al. were already drawing attention from adults. By the time I was eight years old, my parents had been persuaded by teachers and friends to enroll me in private art lessons.

I recall the informal "admissions test" with my first art instructor. A scale model of a bull was placed in front of me on a table and I was asked to draw it. The plastic bull was a faithful reproduction, full of muscles and knobby joints. It was an ugly, forlorn thing, far removed from my normal subject matter. After a few minutes, the resulting drawing was roughly in proportion, the details were well represented, and the perspective was pretty close. I was in.

Thus began eight years of regular art instruction. I progressed from pencils and pastels to watercolors and acrylics, and finally to oils. The content was mostly classical: lots of still lifes and landscapes. Meanwhile, back at home, I slowly covered my bedroom walls (and some of the ceiling) with colored-pencil and chalk-pastel recreations of Larry Elmore and Keith Parkinson book covers, fantasy calendar art, and as much imported Japanese animation as I could get my pre-Internet-suburban-child's hands on.

I enjoyed both the process and the results. But long before my art lessons stopped around age sixteen, I knew I would never be a professional artist. Partly, this was just a milder incarnation of other children's realizations that they would never be, say, Major League Baseball players. But the real turning point for me came with the onset of puberty and its accompanying compulsive self-analysis. I realized that I owed what success I had as an artist not to any specific art-related aptitude, but rather to a more general and completely orthogonal skill.

Drawing what you actually see—that is, drawing the plastic bull that's in front of you rather than the simplified, idealized image of a bull that's in your head—is something that does not come naturally to most people, let alone children. At its root, my gift was not the ability to draw what I saw. Rather, it was the ability to look at what I had drawn thus far and understand what was wrong with it.

By all accounts, Steve Jobs is no engineer. He was never a programming maven like Bill, nor was he a hardware wiz like Woz. On his own, Jobs could not create much of anything. But that's not his superpower.

While other children were satisfied with their loosely connected conglomerations of orbs and sticks, I saw something that bore little resemblance to its subject. And so, in my own work, I attempted to make the necessary corrections. When that failed, as it inevitably did, I started over. Again and again and again, each time making minor improvements, but all the while still seeing all the many ways that I had failed to persuade my body to produce the correct line or apply the appropriate coloring.

By my early teens, the truth of it was staring at me from the walls of my room, covered not with original artwork but with slavish reproductions of other works. Copying completed two-dimensional images played perfectly to my actual strengths. It was a trick. All that praise for my work and all those expectations for my future career in art were simply misattributions of my talent.

I was like Wolverine, whose superpower is not his nigh-indestructible skeleton or super-sharp metal claws, but rather his body's ability to heal, which made his surgical augmentation possible, and which allows those claws to repeatedly pierce his hands without causing permanent injury.

If ignorance is bliss…

This acute awareness of deficiencies colors all my memories of childhood. Toys, in particular, were a focal point of dissatisfaction. I didn't understand why toy manufacturers couldn't see the countless ways that their products differed from the on-screen characters, machinery, or structures that they were based on. Transforming toys were the biggest offenders, as it was often physically impossible for all configurations to look correct. (I would have been satisfied with just one, but even that rarely happened.)

But my scrutiny was not limited to my own artwork or the products of multinational conglomerates. Oh no, it extended to everything I encountered. This pasta is slightly over-cooked. The top of that door frame is not level. Some paint from that wall got onto the ceiling. Text displayed in 9-point Monaco exhibits a recurring one-pixel spacing anomaly in this operating system. Ahem.

Now, at this point, it's reasonable to ask, "Have you considered the possibility that you're just an excessively critical jerk?" I can tell you that, over the years, I have dwelled quite a bit on my…"peculiar predisposition," let's call it.

The drawbacks are obvious. Knowing what's wrong with something (or thinking that you do, which, for the purposes of this discussion, should be considered the same thing) does a fat lot of good if you lack the skills to correct it. And thinking that you know what's wrong with everything requires significant impulse control if you want to avoid pissing off everyone you meet.

But much worse than that, it means that everything you ever create appears to you as an accumulation of defeats. "Here's where I gave up trying to get that part right and moved on to the next part." Because at every turn, it's apparent to you exactly how poorly executed your work-in-progress is, and how far short it will inevitably fall when completed. But surrender you must, at each step of the process, because the alternative is to never complete anything—or to never start at all.