You really should be terrible at something.
And I don’t just mean regular bad. I mean abysmal. A joke. You should be so regrettably awful that friends and tutors of your trade swear off any hope of you getting past square one. So bad that you never do get past square one.
Now, don’t expect your friends to keep doing this thing with you. Don’t expect to watch yourself improve and feel the resulting pride. Just embrace being awful, and don’t quit (spoiler alert: this is not a lecture about perseverance, it’s about being terrible).
Just be bad at something for the sake of being bad. It’s not always easy to be bad. If you do something enough, you’re liable to get better at it, and that’s at odds with the whole point.
You’ve just got to stay terrible.
Early on you will feel shame. Your friends will not join you; bystanders will gasp. Babies will cry, dogs will bark, and cats will howl at your efforts. Parents will shield the eyes of their children as you flail wildly away. They will judge you and feel pity, but pay them no mind. You know that this is not some process, but the plan.
To be clear, this is not an argument for how instructive the learning process itself can be, or how being a beginner at something teaches humility that makes you a better person, or that being bad at something is somehow a kind of necessary evil that rests somewhere along they way to mastery. Those are all valid points, but this is more simple.
Eventually, if you’re bad enough for long enough, you might just stop feeling ashamed. You might stop noticing the gawking and gasping bystanders. If you’re bad enough for long enough, eventually, you’ll get pretty good at being awful.
The more time that you spend hacking it up, the more comfortable it will become. If you stick it out for long enough, your enjoyment the things you do will dissociate from your proficiency at them. And then pretty soon you’ll just enjoy having a day out.
If you can enjoy being bad, you’ll never be afraid to try something ever again. And who knows? Maybe you’ll be good at that.
Logical Fallacies of Facebook
"Woo! OK!" she said. I couldn't agree more. Here we are, in our offices and in front of our desks, on the first work day ... Read more
Entropy at Work
Those of us who were born recently enough to only have followed the last several national elections may be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that ... Read more