Wizard-Style vs Witch-Style

In my January recap, I linked to a video I enjoyed called "Wizard Cooking vs Witch Cooking". The video talks about different methods of cooking in real life and how to apply them in a fictional/world building context. It uses wizards and witches as a metaphor for strictly following the (cook)book vs just eyeballing ingredients as you go along.

While the video mostly sticks to talking about cooking there were some things that made me wonder how this kind of thinking could be applied to other activities as well.

"Since cookbooks for the home chef became popular, more and more people in the west feel obligated to measure everything from spices to meat as precisely as possible. This has always been weird to me, because I was raised on the idea that cookbooks are for inspiration, not for following to a T. Except for baking. Baking witch style is really really hard. So is stuff like making pasta. The only people who can do these things reliably do it very often and all day long."

So, cooking can be done either way, but baking is usually only done wizard-style. Not that it can't be done witch-style, just that it's really difficult to do consistently.

Are there any other activities that fall under this spectrum? Are there any activities that are strictly one or the other? That's what I've been trying to figure out.

Not long after I first saw this video I met up with my local fiber arts group. I've started going there regularly and I'm the youngest person there by at least a couple decades.

After I watched the video I assumed that crochet would probably be a "wizard activity". There's a decent bit of math involved. Depending on what you're making, having a single extra or missing stitch in an early row/round can cause a domino effect that messes up your whole project. Some patterns I've seen start with something like "start with a multiple of 3 plus 1 chains (3n+1)" or something like that. Seems pretty technical and wizard-like to me!

So, I show up to one of the meetups with that in the back of my head. About halfway through I'm talking to one of the women there and she just casually mentions that she's never followed a crochet pattern in her entire life! Not even once! She says that she taught herself how to crochet when she was a child and that she found patterns "too constricting". She more or less just makes it up as she goes along. She's crocheting witch-style!

By coincidence, our conversation also ended up shifting to the Great British Baking Show. A lot of the contestants on that show bake witch-style, that's what makes it so impressive to most people I think.

What other things can be done wizard-style or witch-style?

The next thing that popped into my head was a classical artist who meticulously draws a bunch of guidelines and uses reference photos to make sure their anatomy is perfect vs a cartoonist who immediately puts pen to paper and makes whatever feels right in that moment. I'm sure there's other examples but my brain just doesn't feel like cooperating today.

I hope I'm not giving the impression that doing things witch-style is lazy or easy. If anything I imagine it's more effort because it's more experimenting with things. You have to keep track of what does and doesn't work and fix things if they don't work out.

Also happy Valentines Day! I totally forgot it even was Valentines Day until a friend of mine texted me lol.