Your first cake will lean. Your fifth will stand. Nobody posts cake number one through four.

What you see of other people’s skills is filtered down to the successes, which makes the normal path look abnormal. Four leaning cakes is not a sign you are bad at this; it is the standard number, and everyone good has a set of them nobody saw. Comparing your attempt to someone’s published result is comparing a process to an advert.

Save the failures where you can see them, in order, just for you. Make the fifth one and compare it to the first rather than to anything online. Then, if you want, post number one as well, because somebody out there is about to quit at number two.