Honestly, it depends on where you’re at, but I’d lean toward a hybrid approach rather than picking strictly one or the other:
If you’re brand new to a technique or tool — follow along step by step first. You don’t yet have the mental model to know why certain choices are being made, so trying to improvise too early usually just leads to frustration and giving up. Following along builds the muscle memory and vocabulary you need.
Once you’ve got the basics down — start watching a chunk of the tutorial (a step or a short section), then pause and try to do it yourself before seeing how the instructor does it. This forces you to actually problem-solve instead of just copying clicks, and you’ll retain way more because you had to think it through.
After finishing a tutorial once — this is the underrated step. Go back and redo it without the video, from memory. That’s usually when things really click, because you find the gaps in your understanding that following along masked.
So: watch-and-follow to learn the moves, then watch-then-try to build independence, then redo-from-memory to actually own the skill. Doing a tutorial passively start to finish just once, without ever revisiting it, is where most people lose the value — the real learning happens in the struggle to reproduce it yourself.
